Mark Twain

Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.

A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it. It is unsuited to the drawing room, and in the most cultured society it has long been banished from the social board. It has at last, in our day of progress and improvement, been degraded to brotherhood with flatulence. Among the best bred, these two arts are now indulged only in private– though by consent of the whole company, when only males are present, it is still permissible, in good society, to remove the embargo on the fundamental sigh.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy with physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art.

If he really thinks there is no distinction between vice and virtue, when he leaves our houses let us count our spoons.

The only things one can admire at length are those one admires without knowing why.

Anger is a brief lunacy.

Go anywhere in England where there are natural, wholesome, contented, and really nice English people; and what do you always find? That the stables are the real center of the household.

Do not do to others what angers you if done to you by others.

Every man who attacks my belief, diminishes in some degree my confidence in it, and therefore makes me uneasy; and I am angry with him who makes me uneasy.

What Englishman will give his mind to politics as long as he can afford to keep a motor car?

The trees are about to show us how lovely it is to let things go.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

We must be our own before we can be another’s.

However small the chance might be of striking lucky, the chance is there. The chance had to be there.

I lose my respect for the man who can make the mystery of sex the subject of a coarse jest, yet when you speak earnestly and seriously on the subject, is silent.

Discern of the coming on of years, and think not to do the same things still; for age will not be defied.