Mark Twain

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first – that is the idea.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

I have lived some thirty-odd years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice from my seniors.

If we want maturity, we have to be mature. If we want a nation that feels hopeful, then we have to speak in hopeful terms… We have to model what we want.

A sudden bold and unexpected question does many times surprise a man and lay him open.

The first time someone shows you who they are, believe them.

What I mean is you make the world less ugly just by living in it.

If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life.

It is difficult, if not impossible, for most people to think otherwise than in the fashion of their own period.

Coercion is evil precisely because it…eliminates an individual as a thinking and valuing person and makes him a bare tool in the achievement of the ends of another.

Nature is full of freaks, and now puts an old head on young shoulders, and then takes a young heart heating under fourscore winters.

Extended empires are like expanded gold, exchanging solid strength for feeble splendor.

The stars are the apexes of what triangles!

Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to the country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each. Let them be your only diet, drink, and botanical medicines.

Courage is a quality so necessary for maintaining virtue, that it is always respected, even when it is associated with vice.

In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.