Mark Twain

Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.

The results of life are uncalculated and uncalculable. The years teach much which the days never know. The persons who compose our company, converse, and come and go, and design and execute many things, and somewhat comes of it all, but an unlooked for result. The individual is always mistaken. He designed many things, and drew in other persons as coadjutors, quarrelled with some or all, blundered much, and something is done; all are a little advanced, but the individual is always mistaken. It turns out somewhat new, and very unlike what he promised himself.

Anger is short madness

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

After the first blush of sin comes its indifference.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Life must be filled up, and the man who is not capable of intellectual pleasures must content himself with such as his senses can afford.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Pain is less subject than pleasure to careless expression.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.

I have found it to be the most serious objection to coarse labors long continued, that they compelled me to eat and drink coarsely also.

Was there ever such an autumn? And yet there was never such a panic and hard times in the commercial world. The merchants and banks are suspending and failing all the country over, but not the sandbanks, solid and warm, and streaked with bloody blackberry vines.You may run upon them as much as you please – even as the crickets do, and find their account in it. They are the stockholders in these banks, and I hear them creaking their content.

A beautiful form is better than a beautiful face; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine arts.

Something made greater by ourselves and in turn that makes us greater.

I think that somehow, we learn who we really are and then live with that decision.

Sow a thought and you reap an action; sow an act and you reap a habit; sow a habit and you reap a character; sow a character and you reap a destiny.