Mark Twain

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion – several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven.

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

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

Your mind will enchain you. Your heart will set you free.

The pains you feel are messengers. Listen to them.

There are no conditions to which a person cannot grow accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

You see things; and you say Why? But I dream things that never were; and I say Why not?

Revolutions go not backward.

Events tend to recur in cycles…

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit – not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic. Its throes will heave our exuviate from their graves.

The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.

We are apt to love praise, but not deserve it. But if we would deserve it, we must love virtue more than that.

We are wiser than we know.

Without friends the world is but a wilderness. There is no man that imparteth his joys to his friends, but he joyeth the more; and no man that imparteth his grieves to his friend, but he grieveth the less.

The value of a dollar is social, as it is created by society.