Mark Twain

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again – and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another’s and each obeying its own law.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.

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.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words – 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

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.

Words are alive; cut them and they bleed.

For disappointments, that come not by our own folly, they are the trials or corrections of Heaven: and it is our own fault, if they prove not our advantage.

Never waste jealousy on a real man: it is the imaginary man that supplants us all in the long run.

Nakedness is uncomely, as well in mind as body, and it addeth no small reverence to men’s manners and actions if they be not altogether open. Therefore set it down: That a habit of secrecy is both politic and moral.

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

That was Youth with its reckless exuberance when all things were possible pursued by Age where we are now, looking back at what we destroyed, what we tore away from that self who could do more, and its work that’s become my enemy because that’s what I can tell you about, that Youth who could do anything.

When you know better, you do better.

Have the courage to say no. Have the courage to face the truth. Do the right thing because it is right. These are the magic keys to living your life with integrity.

We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.