Mark Twain

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good – and less trouble!

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

Principles aren’t of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

It takes an enemy and a friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart. The one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

Nature has always had more force than education.

We are prisoners of ideas.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

He who is not everyday conquering some fear has not learned the secret of life.

I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.

Why do you treat me as they do, as though I were exactly what I want to be. Why do we treat people that way?

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.

We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body.

While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember that everyone else and everything else are also God’s creation.

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.