Mark Twain

His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

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

There it is: it doesn’t make any difference who we are or what we are, there’s always somebody to look down on! somebody to hold in light esteem, somebody to be indifferent about.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

If a man knew anything, he would sit in a corner and be modest; but he is such an ignorant peacock, that he goes bustling up and down, and hits on extraordinary discoveries.

Drive a nail home and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction,a work at which you would not be ashamed to invoke the Muse.

What contemptible scoundrel has stolen the cork to my lunch?

A man thinks as well through his legs and arms as this brain.

Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo.

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

Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.

The two offices of memory are collection and distribution.

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart’s Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes…

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderated use rather than total abstinence.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

The course of everything goes to teach us faith.