Mark Twain

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

I am a sky gazer. The sky, it pulls at me. Its amazing eternal expanse of breathtaking beauty calls me back to my senses, stretches my awareness, soothes my eyes, opens my heart, stills me. I feel a soft soul longing to be up there, in the vastness, amongst the clouds that are alive and billow and skud and glow; metamorphosing from perfection into perfection. A constantly changing canvas brushed by magic.

Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain.

Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.

He who is only a traveler learns things at second-hand and by the halves, and is poor authority. We are most interested when science reports what those men already know practically or instinctively, for that alone is a true humanity, or account of human experience.

All endeavor calls for the ability to tramp the last mile, shape the last plan, endure the last hours toil. The fight to the finish spirit is the one… characteristic we must posses if we are to face the future as finishers.

There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling and spending their lives like servants.

A man’s wife has more power over him than the state has.

A lucky person gets up in the morning, puts both feet on the floor, knows what they’re about to do and thinks it still matters.

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

So of cheerfulness, or a good temper, the more it is spent, the more it remains.

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

If pleasure was not followed by pain, who would forbear it?

Some natures are too good to be spoiled by praise.