Mark Twain

It takes an enemy and a friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart. The one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.

I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.

The colleges, while they provide us with libraries, furnish no professors of books; and I think no chair is so much needed.

Fierce eagles do not produce timorous doves.

The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly.

I do not know how to distinguish between our waking life and a dream. Are we not always living the life that we imagine we are?

The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome. They who lived with them found life glad and nutritious. Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society.

There are a terrible lot of lies going about the world, and the worst of it is that half of them are true.

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.

An empire is an immense egotism.

Old age is the most unexpected of all the things that can happen to a man.

No thought, no reflection, no analysis, no cultivation, no intention; let it settle itself.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

If we do not maintain Justice, Justice will not maintain us.

Opening amenities are often opening inanities.

If government knew how, I should like to see it check, not multiply, the population. When it reaches its true law of action, every man that is born will be hailed as essential.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.