Mark Twain

It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character.

Above all, be the heroine of your life, not the victim.

Prosperity is not without many fears and distastes; adversity not without many comforts and hopes.

All of our actions take their hue from the complexion of the heart, as landscapes their variety from light.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Silence is the most perfect expression of scorn.

Nothing in life is more liberating than to fight for a cause larger than yourself, something that encompasses you but is not defined by your existence alone.

The advantage of doing one’s praising to oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

Your fingers caress my heart strings, shaping a silent sonnet in notes of love. Transcending space and time, bathing the ether in perfect harmony.

Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.

Cure the disease and kill the patient.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.