Mark Twain

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

It is by the goodness of God that we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn’t something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly – a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it.

What is the matter with the poor is poverty; what is the matter with the rich is uselessness.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

I didn’t find my friends; the good Lord gave them to me.

The wound is the place where the light enters you.

Friendship is the marriage of the soul, and this marriage is liable to divorce.

Being is the great explainer.

One of the benefits of a college education is to show the boy its little avail.

Ladies and gentleman are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.

Don’t order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don’t know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.