Mark Twain

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

The lack of money is the root of all evils.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we.”

If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.

If there is any period one would desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era?

If it be an evil to judge rashly or untruly any single man, how much a greater sin it is to condemn a whole people.

The wise man applauds he who he thinks most virtuous; the rest of the world applauds the wealthy.

Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

I am the captain of my soul.

Passion, though a bad regulator, is a powerful spring.

There are innumerable questions to which the inquisitive mind can in this state receive no answer: Why do you and I exist? Why was this world created? Since it was to be created, why was it not created sooner?

Prudence is an attitude that keeps life safe, but does not often make it happy.

When you do the wrong thing, knowing it is wrong, you do so because you haven’t developed the habit of effectively controlling or neutralizing strong inner urges that tempt you, or because you have established the wrong habit and don’t know how to eliminate them effectively.

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.

We must rekindle the fire of idealism in our society, for nothing suffocates the promise of America more than unbounded cynicism and indifference.

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.