Mark Twain

The way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.

Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

The finest clothing made is a person’s own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European coffee, one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

The country life is to be preferred, for there we see the works of God; but in cities little else but the works of men. And the one makes a better subject for contemplation than the other.

A crank is someone with a new idea – until it catches on.

The secret of all good writing is sound judgment.

It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all.

People do not deserve to have good writings; they are so pleased with the bad.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

Every person who has mastered a profession is a skeptic concerning it.

Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.

Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

When you do something, you should burn yourself up completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Power over others is weakness disguised as strength. True power is within and available to you now.

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water drinkers.

Shut your mouth, close your lips, and say something!