Samuel Langhorne Clemens (pen name: Mark Twain)

• “"Varanasi" is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together”
• “(Twain on Cain): it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea”
• “. . . a man must not hold himself aloof from the things which his friends and his community have at heart if he would be liked . . .”
• “...It is hard to overestimate how far a man can go in America if he looks good on a horse.”
• “[(CNN) --] Four years at West Point and plenty of books and schooling will learn a man a great deal, ... It won't learn him the river.”
• “[On his deathbed:] Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuse are for all -- the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved”
• “[The undersecretary's blundering tour of the Middle East might be the latest incarnation of Innocents Abroad.] The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them, ... We bore down on them with America's greatness until we crushed them.”
• “A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother”
• “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain”
• “A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.”
• “A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime”
• “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”
• “A coin, sleeve button, or a collar button dropped in a bedroom will hide itself and be hard to find. A handkerchief in bed 'can't' be found.”
• “A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.”
• “A crowded police court docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty”
• “A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment”
• “A genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is 500 years away easier than he can a thing that's only 500 seconds off”
• “A good and wholesome thing is a little harmless fun in this world; it tones a body up and keeps him human and prevents him from souring.”
• “A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation”
• “A great soul, with a great purpose, can make a weak body strong and keep it so”
• “A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is just about as inspiring.”
• “A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.”
• “A healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation”
• “A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.”
• “A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.”
• “A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.”
• “A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants.”
• “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes”
• “A man can seldom -- very, very, seldom -- fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.”
• “A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”
• “A man cannot be uncomfortable without his own approval”
• “A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows”
• “A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself as a liar”
• “A man may have no bad habits and have worse”
• “A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be led by the nose”
• “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn by no other way”
• “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
• “A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt”
• “A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation”
• “A man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first”
• “A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential -- there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.”
• “A man's private thought can never be a lie; what he thinks, is to him the truth, always”
• “A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.”
• “A most moving and pulse-stirring honor - the heartfelt grope of the hand, and the welcome that does not descend from the pale, gray matter of the brain but rushes up with the red blood of the heart”
• “A mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart - a heart so large that everybody's grief and everybody's joy found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.”
• “A nation is only an individual multiplied”
• “A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.”
• “A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.”
• “A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words... the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”
• “A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them”
• “A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.”
• “A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.”
• “A scientist will never show any kindness for a theory which he did not start himself.”
• “A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.”
• “A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once not oftener.”
• “A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it”
• “A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes”
• “A thoroughly beautiful woman and a thoroughly homely woman are creations which I love to gaze upon, and which I cannot tire of gazing upon, for each is perfect in her own line”
• “A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.”
• “Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.”
• “Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often”
• “Adam and Eve had many advantages but the principal one was, that they escaped teething”
• “Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.”
• “Adam was the author of sin, and I wish he had taken out an international copyright on it.”
• “Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law.”
• “Adam was the only man who, when saying a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him.”
• “Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”
• “After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.”
• “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
• “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.”
• “All generalizations are false, including this one.”
• “All good things arrive unto them that wait - and don't die in the meantime”
• “All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised.”
• “All kings is mostly rapscallions”
• “All of us contain Music and Truth, but most of us can't get it out”
• “All right, then, I'll go to hell.”
• “All saints can do miracles, but few of them can keep a hotel”
• “All say, how hard it is that we have to die - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live”
• “All scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm.”
• “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.1908, notebook”
• “All the modern inconveniences”
• “All the talk used to be about doing people good, now it is about doing people”
• “All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it”
• “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”
• “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”
• “Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”
• “Always obey your parents - when they are present.”
• “America is built on a tilt, and everything loose slides towards California.”
• “An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency”
• “An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write ''metropolis'' for seven cents, because I can get the same money for ''city'.' I never write ''policeman',' because I can get the same price for ''cop'.'... I never write ''valetudinarian'' at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.”
• “An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.”
• “An ethical man is a Christian holding four aces”
• “An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite often picturesque liar”
• “An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere”
• “An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war”
• “An occasional compliment is necessary to keep up one's self-respect”
• “An occultation of Venus is not half so difficult as an eclipse of the Sun, but because it comes seldom the world thinks it's a grand thing”
• “And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows!”
• “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”
• “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born /a hundred million years /and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.”
• “Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary”
• “Any mummery will cure if the patient's faith is strong in it.”
• “Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.”
• “Anybody can write the first line of a poem, but is a very difficult task to make the second line rhyme with the first”
• “Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.”
• “As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and. . . Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.”
• “As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!”
• “As to the Adjective; when in doubt, strike it out”
• “At fifty a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass”
• “Balloon: Thing to take meteroric observations and commit suicide with”
• “Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.”
• “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”
• “Be good and you will be lonely”
• “Be good and you will be lonesome”
• “Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any”
• “Be virtuous and you will be eccentric.”
• “Be Yourself is about the worst advice you can give to people.”
• “Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: -- ''I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.''”
• “Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society.”
• “because it's more recent.”
• “Benefit of clergy: Half-rate on the railroad”
• “Better a broken promise than none at all.”
• “Between believing a thing and thinking you know is only a small step and quickly taken”
• “Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.”
• “Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written”
• “Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”
• “Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it”
• “Boy, can't you feel the ghosts of a century and a half of great thinkers, especially Twain?”
• “Broad, wholesome, charitable views ... can not be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth.”
• “But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. . . . It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good . . .”
• “But we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we glorious Americans will occasionally astonish the God that created us when we get a fair start”
• “But when the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface”
• “By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed”
• “By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.”
• “By the etiquette of war, it is permitted to none below the rank of newspaper correspondent to dictate to the general in the field”
• “By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.”
• “By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity another man's, I mean”
• “Cast iron rules will not answer what is one man's colon is another man's comma”
• “Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”
• “Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with”
• “Chastity - you can carry it too far”
• “Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence - stuffed and in a museum”
• “Circumstance - which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final and must be obeyed by all - and will be”
• “Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.”
• “Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it”
• “Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities”
• “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.”
• “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
• “Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd have frozen to death.”
• “Comedy keeps the heart sweet.”
• “Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.”
• “Conformity-the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority”
• “Conscience takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides.”
• “Conscience, man's moral medicine chest”
• “Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals”
• “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear”
• “Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century”
• “Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.”
• “Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow”
• “Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old and weary and broken of heart”
• “Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives and obscene stories”
• “Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.”
• “Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded”
• “Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more restful”
• “Distance lends enchantment to the view”
• “Do good when you can, and charge when you think they will stand it”
• “Do not offer a compliment and ask a favor at the same time. A compliment that is charged for is not valuable.”
• “Do not put off till tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well”
• “Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.”
• “Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”
• “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
• “Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.”
• “Do your duty today and repent tomorrow”
• “Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself”
• “Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first”
• “Don't let schooling interfere with your education.”
• “Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
• “Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”
• “'Don't you worry, and don't you hurry.' I know that phrase by heart, and if all other music should perish out of the world it would still sing to me.”
• “Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.”
• “Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.”
• “Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval - a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death”
• “Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let them label you as they may.”
• “Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catchphrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let man label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country- hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.”
• “Each person is born to one possession which out values all his others - his last breath”
• “Earn a character first if you can. And if you can't, assume one.”
• “Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned”
• “Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know; it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.”
• “Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
• “Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information”
• “Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more.”
• “Eternal rest sounds comforting in the pulpit; well, you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands”
• “Etiquette requires us to admire the human race”
• “Even Noah got no salary for the first six months partly on account of the weather and partly because he was learning navigation.”
• “Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody”
• “Every time I reform in one direction I go overboard in another.”
• “Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.”
• “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
• “Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold”
• “Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.”
• “Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on ''The Survival of the Fittest.'' These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.”
• “Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word. Consider the flea! -- incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.”
• “Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word”
• “Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new”
• “Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.”
• “Facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful - Get your facts first, and - then you can distort 'em as much as you please”
• “Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion”
• “Familiarity breeds contempt - and children”
• “Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.”
• “Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean.”
• “Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon”
• “Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.”
• “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
• “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.”
• “Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a congressman can”
• “For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness”
• “For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.”
• “For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian and German political degradations which would envelop the globe and steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night and slaverly which would last till Christ comes again--which I hope he will n”
• “For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment”
• “For we were little Christian children and early learned the value of forbidden fruit”
• “Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.”
• “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
• “Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her”
• “Four years at West Point and plenty of books and schooling will learn a man a great deal, It won't learn him the river.”
• “France had neither winter nor summer nor morals - apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country”
• “Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it”
• “From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any first and foremost object but one - to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for himself.”
• “Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.”
• “Geological time is not money”
• “George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.”
• “Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.”
• “Get the facts first. You can distort them later.”
• “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
• “Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.”
• “Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”
• “God has put somrthing noble and good into every heart His hand created.”
• “God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board”
• “God puts something good and something lovable in every man His hands create.”
• “God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.”
• “God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New - the Jekyll and Hyde of sacred romance”
• “God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage”
• “Going to law is losing a cow for the sake of a cat.”
• “Golden rule: Made of hard metal so it could stand severe wear, it not being known at that time that butter would answer”
• “Golf is a good walk spoiled.”
• “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”
• “Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of our selves, and how little we think of the other person”
• “Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”
• “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.)”
• “Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
• “Great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammer”
• “Great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they perform.”
• “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy must have somebody to divide it with.”
• “Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.”
• “Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time”
• “Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.”

• “Happiness ain't a thing in itself /it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.”
• “Happiness is a Swedish sunset; it is there for all, but most of us look the other way and lose it”
• “Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.”
• “Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else; this is not advice, it is merely custom.”
• “He gossips habitually; he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue”
• “He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it- namely, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain”
• “He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person”
• “He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think / yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.”
• “He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages”
• “He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.”
• “He said, 'I've never seen a festival where the whole nation gets behind an event. The Cup astonishes'. We are still thinking the same thing.”
• “He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly”
• “He was a preacher, too... and never charged nothing for his preaching, and it was worth it, too.”
• “He was as shy as a newspaper is when referring to its own merits”
• “He would go to Halifax for half a chance to show off and he would go to hell for a whole one”
• “Heaven for climate, hell for society.”
• “Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in”
• “Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.”
• “Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it”
• “Heroine: Girl in a book who is saved from drowning by a hero and marries him next week, but if it was to be over again ten years later it is likely she would rather have a life-belt and he would rather have her have it”
• “Heroine: girl who is perfectly charming to live with, in a book.”
• “His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere”
• “His liberties were totally unrestricted, ... He was the only really independent person - boy or man - in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest of us.”
• “His money is twice tainted: 'taint yours and 'taint mine”
• “History does not repeat itself. But it does rhyme.”
• “History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes”
• “History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal.”
• “History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably”
• “Honest poverty is a gem that even a king might be proud to call his own - but I wish to sell out”
• “Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.”
• “Honesty: The best of all the lost arts”
• “How empty is theory in the presence of fact”
• “How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.”
• “Human pride is not worthwhile; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it”
• “Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.”
• “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.”
• “Humor is tragedy plus time”
• “Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.”
• “Hunger is the handmaid of genius”
• “I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.”
• “I am a border ruffian from the State of Missouri,I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption.In me you have Missouri morals,Connecticut culture;this gentlemaen,is the combination which makes the perfect man”
• “I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct - nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.”
• “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
• “I am different from Washington. I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't.”
• “I am glad the old masters are all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner.”
• “I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one”
• “I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”
• “I am prepared to meet anyone, but whether anyone is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.”
• “I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's”
• “I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way.”
• “I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says - "Yes; the little ones does”
• “I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.”
• “I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey”
• “I can live for two months on a good compliment.”
• “I can speak French but I cannot understand it.”
• “I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.”
• “I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.”
• “I cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive”
• “I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious - unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force”
• “I can't do literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant”
• “I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating”
• “I could have made a neat retort but didn't, for I was flurried and didn't think of it till I was downstairs”
• “I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.”
• “I deal with temptation by yielding to it”
• “I did not attend his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it”
• “I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
• “I do not like work even when someone else does it”
• “I do not want Michaelangelo for breakfast - but for luncheon - for dinner - for tea - for supper - for between meals.”
• “I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer”
• “I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places”
• “I don't mind what the opposition say of me so long as they don't tell the truth about me.”
• “I even ate in the famous clubhouse twice and stood right next to Jack Nicklaus there!”
• “I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.”
• “I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble”
• “I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won t.”
• “I have been cautioned to talk but be careful not to say anything. I do not consider this a difficult task.”
• “I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.”
• “I have found out there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them”
• “I have made it a rule never to smoke more that one cigar at a time.”
• “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
• “I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.”
• “I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.”
• “I have no race prejudice. I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being -- that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.”
• “I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate... and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead.”
• “I have studied it often, but I never could discover the plot”
• “I have told him all I know about it. And now he knows nothing about it himself.”
• “I have traveled more than any one else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent”
• “I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.”
• “I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices”
• “I haven't heard anything like that since the orphanage burned down”
• “I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born”
• “I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.”
• “I learned long ago never to say the obvious thing, but leave the obvious thing to commonplace and inexperienced people to say”
• “I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.”
• “I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it”
• “I make it a rule never to smoke while I'm sleeping.”
• “I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.”
• “I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.”
• “I never did a thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise that I didn't repent of within twenty-four hours”
• “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”
• “I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.”
• “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get”
• “I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.”
• “I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.”
• “I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.”
• “I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way”
• “I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering and that was the fact that it is past - and can't be restored”
• “I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.”
• “I saw a cat yesterday with 4 legs and yet it was only a yellow cat, and rather small, too, for its size. They were not all fore legs several of them were hind legs; indeed almost a majority of them were.”
• “I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political Editor who is already excellent and only needs to serve a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect”
• “I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindu theology, ... but the difficulties were too great.”
• “I think a compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception”
• “I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world”
• “I thoroughly believe that any man who's got anything worthwhile to say will be heard if he only says it often enough.”
• “I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.”
• “I was born excited.”
• “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said that I didn't know.”
• “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said, "I don't know."”
• “I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one”
• “I was sorry to have my name mentioned among the great authors because they have a sad habit of dying off”
• “I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolish”
• “I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble, if there were only one in the world.”
• “I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.”
• “I would much prefer to suffer from the clean incision of an honest lancet than from a sweetened poison”
• “I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S. Grant in full military regalia.”
• “I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it”
• “I, Mark Twain being of sound mind, have spent everything”
• “Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.”
• “If a person offends you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick.”
• “If all men were rich, all men would be poor”
• “If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.”
• “If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be - a Christian”
• “If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.”
• “If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
• “If I cannot smoke cigars in Heaven, I shall not go”
• “If I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to energy, and fall down and worship it”
• “If it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary”
• “If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.”
• “If man had created man he would be ashamed of his performance”
• “If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.”
• “If there is a God, he is a malign thug”
• “If there is one thing that will make a man peculiarly and insufferable self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick”
• “If there was two birds sitting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first.”
• “If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.”
• “If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time”
• “If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.”
• “If you have nothing to say, say nothing.”
• “If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.”
• “If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them - you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so”
• “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. That is the difference between dog and man.”
• “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.”
• “If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.”
• “Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty”
• “Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use”
• “I'll take Heaven for the climate and Hell for society.”
• “In a museum in Havana there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, Òone when he was a boy and one when he was a man.Ó”
• “In all my travels the thing that has impressed me the most is the universal brotherhood of man what there is of it.”
• “In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money”
• “In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.”
• “In discarding the monkey and substituting man, our Father in Heaven did the monkey an undeserved injustice”
• “In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.”
• “In India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.”
• “In literature imitations do not imitate”
• “In my experience, only third-rate intelligence is sent to Legislatures to make laws, because the first-rate article will not leave important private interests go unwatched to go and serve the public for a beggarly four or five dollars a day, and a mi”
• “In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language”
• “In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other”
• “In religion, India is the only millionaire - the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined”
• “In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.”
• “In the beginning of a change, the Patriot is a scarce man, Brave, Hated, and Scorned. When his cause succeeds however,the timid join him, For then it costs nothing to be a Patriot.”
• “In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
• “In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.”
• “In the South the war is what AD is elsewhere; they date from it”
• “In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.”
• “Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity- these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them.”
• “Independence - is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes”
• “India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion, other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.”
• “India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. Our most valuable and most astrictive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only!”
• “Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine.”
• “Intellectual ''work'' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.”
• “Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense”
• “Is a person's public and private opinion the same? It is thought there have been instances”
• “Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of civilization one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?”
• “It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.”
• “It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake”
• “It is a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed”
• “It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.”
• “It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help”
• “It is a pity that we cannot escape from life when we are young.”
• “It is a solemn thought: Dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork”
• “It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him”
• “It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not”
• “It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them”
• “It is because they do not think at all; they only think they think.”
• “It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise”
• “It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.”
• “It is better to give than receive- especially advice”
• “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
• “It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.”
• “It is better to support schools than jails.”
• “It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.”
• “It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either.”
• “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.”
• “It is curious - curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare”
• “It is easier to manufacture seven facts out of whole cloth than one emotion”
• “It is easier to stay out than get out.”
• “It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.”
• “It is hard enough luck being a monarch, without being a target also”
• “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”
• “It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.”
• “It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right”
• “It is my custom to keep on talking until I get the audience cowed”
• “It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good -- and less trouble!”
• “It is not best that we use our morals week days; it gets them out of repair for Sundays”
• “It is not likely that any complete life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of the person that lived it”
• “It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible”
• “It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one”
• “It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval.”
• “It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and undeservedly succeed when the informed and experienced fail.”
• “It is the difference of opinion that makes horse races.”
• “It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden”
• “It is very wearing to be good”
• “It is your human environment that makes climate”
• “It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.”
• “It isn't so astonishing the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things that I can remember that aren't so.”
• “It may be called the master passion, the hunger for self-approval”
• “It takes me along time to lose my temper, but once lost I could not find it with a dog”
• “It takes your enemy and your friend, working together to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you”
• “It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing - I used to be a good boy”
• “It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term.”
• “It usually takes me three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech”
• “It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”
• “It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday.”
• “It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race”
• “It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”
• “It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races”
• “It will start in here in November and rain about four, and sometimes as much as seven days on a stretch; after that, you may loan out your umbrella for twelve months, with the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces”
• “It’s not true that men forget they’re married when they see a pretty woman. Just the opposite, that’s when they’re most painfully reminded of it.”
• “It's a good idea to obey all the rules when you're young just so you'll have the strength to break them when you're old”
• “It's better to stay silent and look a fool, rather than speak and remove all doubt.”
• “Its easier to stay out than get out”
• “It's good sportsmanship not to pick up lost balls while they are still rolling”
• “It's good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.”
• “It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”
• “It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.”
• “It's spring fever.... You don't quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”
• “I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics”
• “I've never let my school interfere with my education.”
• “I've seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true.”
• “July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.”
• “Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.”
• “Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”
• “Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the and the blind can see”
• “Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can read”
• “Last week I stated that this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister and now wish to withdraw that statement.”
• “Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.”
• “Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.”
• “Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.”
• “Laws control the lesser man... Right conduct controls the greater one.”
• “Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either”
• “Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.”
• “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
• “Let us endeavor to live so that when we die even the undertaker will be sorry”
• “Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence and like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; and it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style”
• “Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.”
• “Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all”
• “Let us save the to-morrows for work”
• “Let us swear while we may, for in heaven it will not be allowed”
• “Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.”
• “Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.”
• “Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen”
• “Lord save us all from... a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.”
• “Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast.”
• “Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”
• “Loyalty to petrified opinion never broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
• “Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”
• “Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.”
• “Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman.”
• “Man is the lowest animal.”
• “Man is the master of the unspoken word, which spoken, is master of him.”
• “Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to.”
• “Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.”
• “Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.”
• “Man was made at the end of the week's work, when God was tired”
• “Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied”
• “Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man”
• “Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little trivialities together and gets a result - such as it is”
• “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
• “Many public-school children seem to know only two dates - 1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion”
• “Mardi Gras is a thing which could hardly exist in the practical North. For the soul of it is the romantic, not the funny and the grotesque. Take away the romantic mysteries, the kings and knights and big-sounding titles, and Mardi-Gras would die, down there in the South.”
• “Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.”
• “Mauritius was made first, and then heaven; and that heaven was copied after Mauritius.”
• “Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds (when asked to comment on the music of Richard Wagner)”
• “Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side”
• “Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.”
• “Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Modesty died when clothes were born. Modesty died when false modesty was born.”
• “Modesty died when clothes were born.”
• “Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.”
• “Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil”
• “Morals are an acquirement - like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis - no man is born with them.”
• “Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals”
• “More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.”
• “Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.”
• “Most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use”
• “Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.”
• “My advice to girls: first, don't smoke to excess; second, don't drink to excess; third, don't marry to excess.”
• “My experience with Providence has not been of a nature to give me great confidence in his judgment, and I consider that my wife crept in while his attention was occupied elsewhere”
• “My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to... its office holders.”
• “My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.”
• “My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.”
• “My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, not a truth that anybody would believe.”
• “My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.”
• “Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.”
• “Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them”
• “Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand”
• “Necessity is the mother of "taking chances"”
• “Necessity knows no law”
• “Never do wrong when people are looking.”
• “Never learn to do anything. If you don't learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.”
• “Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.”
• “Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink- under any circumstances”
• “Never tell a lie except for practice.”
• “Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it”
• “Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it....”
• “Never waste a lie; you never know when you may need it.”
• “New Year's Day - Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”
• “No better liar had there been in these parts as that ball player with hams for arms unless he be a man with a fishing rod and tackle box in his hands and his feet wet as rain.”
• “No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.”
• “No man has a wholly undiseased mind; in one way or another all men are mad”
• “No man is straitly honest to any but himself and God”

• “No matter how healthy a man's morals may be when he enters the White House, he comes out again with a pot-marked soul”
• “No one has ever seen a Republican mass meeting that was devoid of the perception of the ludicrous.”
• “No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances”
• “No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.”
• “No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave”
• “No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies”
• “No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.”
• “Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.”
• “None but the dead have free speech. None but the dead are permitted to speak truth.”
• “None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try”
• “None of us had ever been anywhere before; we all hailed from the interior; travel was a wild novelty... We always took care to make it understood that we were Americans - Americans!”
• “Nothing helps scenery like ham and eggs.”
• “Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth”
• “Nothing is made in vain, but the fly came near it”
• “Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch”
• “Nothing seems to please a fly so much as to be taken for a currant, and if it can be baked in a cake and palmed off on the unwary, it dies happy.”
• “Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kind of people”
• “Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.”
• “Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size”
• “Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates”
• “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief... for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.”
• “Obscurity and competence - that is the life that is best worth living”
• “October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.”
• “Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it”
• “Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.”
• “Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.”
• “Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.”
• “Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth”
• “Old habit of mind is one of the toughest things to get away from in the world. It transmits itself like physical form and feature . . .”
• “On Hawaii: The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean”
• “Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up”
• “Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.”
• “One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it”
• “One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare”
• “One learns through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect”
• “One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.”
• “One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself”
• “One of life's most over-valued pleasures is sexual intercourse; of one of life's least appreciated pleasures in defecation.”
• “One of my theories is that the hearts of men are about alike, no matter what their skin color.”
• “One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.”
• “One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it - they also believed the world was flat”
• “Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth.”
• “Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."”
• “Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”
• “Only strangers eat tamarinds - but they only eat them once”
• “Optimist: Day-dreamer in his small clothes”
• “Optimist: Day-dreamer more elegantly spelled”
• “Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows”
• “Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else”
• “Ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smo”
• “Ours is the "land of the free" nobody denies that nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.)”
• “Part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in”
• “Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside”
• “Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”
• “Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.”
• “People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.”
• “People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”
• “Perseverance is a principle that should be commendable in those who have judgment to govern it”
• “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. By Order of the Author”
• “Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.”
• “Pessimist: The optimist who didn't arrive”
• “Pilgrim's Progress, about a man who left his family, it didn't say why. The statements was interesting, but tough.”
• “Poetry, like chastity, can be carried to far”
• “Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.”
• “Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.”
• “Probably nor'east to sou'west winds varying to the southard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probably areas of rain, snow, heat and drought, succeeded or preceded by earth quakes”
• “Probably there is nothing in the world so suggestive of serene contentment and perfect bliss as the spectacle of a calf chewing a dishrag, but the nearest approach to it is your reedy tenor, standing apart, in sickly attitude, with head thrown back a”
• “Prophecy: Two bull's eyes out of a possible million”
• “Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.”
• “Prosperity is the best protector of principle”
• “Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.”
• “Providence protects children and idiots. I know because I have tested it.”
• “Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.”
• “Public servant: Persons chosen by the people to distribute the graft”
• “Put all your eggs in the one basket and -- Watch That Basket.”
• “Quitting smoking is easy. I've done it a thousand times.”
• “Rail-splitting produced an unparalleled president in Lincoln. But gold hasn't produced even a good A-1 congressman.”
• “Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.”
• “Religion consists of a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain”
• “Remember the poor - it costs nothing”
• “Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.”
• “Richard Wagner: A composer whose music is better than it sounds”
• “Roots.”
• “Sacred cows make the best hamburger”
• “Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination”
• “Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million”
• “Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die.”
• “Senator: Person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time”
• “She is not refined. She is not unrefined. She keeps a parrot.”
• “She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”
• “Shut the door not that it lets in the cold but that it lets out the coziness.”
• “Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like its heaven on earth.”
• “So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.”
• “Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.”
• “Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress and some would lose all of it.”
• “Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute, but they all worship money”
• “Some of his words were not Sunday-school words.”
• “Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists”
• “Some people get an education without going to college; the rest get it after they get out”
• “Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
• “Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results”
• “Sometimes people do get hurt”
• “Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.”
• “Spirit has fifty times the strength and staying-power of brawn and muscle”
• “Stars are good too. I wish I could get some to put in my hair. But I suppose I never can. You would be surprised to find how far off they are, for they do not look it. When they first showed last night I tried to knock some down with a pole, but it didn't reach, which astonished me. Then I tried clods till I was all tired out, but I never got one. I did make some close shots, for I saw the black blot of the clod sail right into thee midst of the golden clusters forty or fifty times, just barely missing them, and if I could've held out a little longer, maybe I could've got one.”
• “Statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by an”
• “Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be”
• “Such a laugh was money in a man's pocket, because it cut down on the doctor's bills like everything.”
• “Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah... didn't miss the boat.”
• “Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself”
• “Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.”
• “Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it”
• “Tell the truth or trump - but get the trick”
• “Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance”
• “That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't care, individuals do.”
• “That's what an army is - a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.”
• “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,”
• “The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next”
• “The Autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze”
• “The average American girl possesses the valuable qualities of naturalness, honesty, and inoffensive straightforwardness; she is nearly barren of troublesome conventions and artificialities; consequently, her presence and her ways are unembarrassing,”
• “The average American's simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak.”
• “The average man don't like trouble and danger.”
• “The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief.”
• “The best and most telling speech is not the actual impromptu one but the counterfeit of it.”
• “The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
• “The Bible is a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology”
• “The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for”
• “The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either.”
• “The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.”
• “The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example”
• “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”
• “The convention miscalled 'modesty' has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice”
• “The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are”
• “The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, it is the thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous. . . .”
• “The Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo”
• “The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it”
• “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
• “The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's”
• “The educated Southerner has no use for an 'R', except at the beginning of a word.”
• “The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.”
• “The English are mentioned in the Bible: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth”
• “The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.”
• “The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book -- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.”
• “The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.”
• “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
• “The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half of life consists of the chance without the capacity”
• “The first half of my life I went to school, the second half of my life I got an education.”
• “The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.”
• “The funerals of these, ... do not occur often enough.”
• “The Ganges front is the supreme showplace of Benares. Its tall bluffs are solidly caked from water to summit, along a stretch of three miles, with a splendid jumble of massive and picturesque masonry, a bewildering and beautiful confusion of stone platforms, temples, stair flights, rich and stately palaces....soaring stairways, sculptured temples, majestic palaces, softening away into the distances; and there is movement, motion, human life everywhere, and brilliantly costumed - streaming in rainbows up and down the lofty stairways, and massed in metaphorical gardens on the mile of great platforms at the river's edge.”
• “The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.”
• “The heart is the real Fountain of Youth.”
• “The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.”
• “The highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor”
• “The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole life - time, if not asked to lend money”
• “The house was as empty as a beer closet in a premises where painters have been at work.”
• “The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.”
• “The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”
• “The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.”
• “The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.”
• “The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong. He can swear and still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way.”
• “The innocent who could laugh with joy didn't dare to because they were sitting beside a guilty friend who didn't dare to”
• “The institution of Royalty in any form is an insult to the human race.”
• “The Jews are members of the human race - worse I can say of no man”
• “The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism”
• “The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods; it remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime. It is no more entitled to respect than is the flag of a pirate.”
• “The lack of money is the root of all evils.”
• “The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. During twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle / yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.”
• “The less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.”
• “The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend is immortal”
• “The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.”
• “The man that sets out to carry a cat by it's tail learns something that will always be useful and which will never grow dim or doubtful.”
• “The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.”
• “The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them”
• “The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little”
• “The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf”
• “The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds”
• “The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only -- not from its privileged classes.”
• “The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit.”
• “The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it - when unpopular”
• “The more I get to know about lawyers, the more I'm in favor of hangin'.”
• “The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become”
• “The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it”
• “The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop”
• “The new political gospel: Public office is private graft”
• “The New York papers have long known that no large question is ever really settled until I have been consulted”
• “The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny”
• “The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying such a laugh was money in a man's pocket because it cut down the doctor's bills like anything”
• “The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes”
• “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.”
• “The ordinary chestnut can beget a sickly and reluctant laugh, but it takes a horse chestnut to fetch the gorgeous big horse-laugh”
• “The partitions of the houses were so thin we could hear the women occupants of adjoining rooms changing their minds.”
• “The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme”
• “The pause-that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence, which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it”
• “The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them. We bore down on them with America's greatness until we crushed them.”
• “The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.”
• “The person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.”
• “The plan of the newspaper is good and wise; when you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one”
• “The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality”
• “The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet”
• “The principle of give and take is the principle of diplomacy - give one and take ten”
• “The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong”
• “The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are right.”
• “The Public is merely a multiplied "me."”
• “The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all”
• “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.”
• “The rain is famous for falling on the just and unjust alike, but if I had the management of such affairs I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust out doors I would drown him”
• “The real yellow peril: Gold”
• “The report of my death was an exaggeration After reading his own obituary, June 2 1897”
• “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated”
• “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”
• “The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.”
• “the rumors of the White Sox demise are greatly exaggerated.”
• “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
• “The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.”
• “The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he”
• “The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable”
• “The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive, but in spite of their religion, not because of it”
• “The statue that advertises its modesty with a fig leaf really brings its modesty under suspicion”
• “the story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights story.”
• “The system of refusing the mere act of drinking and leaving the desire in full force, is unintelligent war tactics, it seems to me”
• “The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.”
• “The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades”
• “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.”
• “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so.”
• “The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people down here, whereas you are merely the most numerous.”
• “The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active . . .”
• “The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.”
• “The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or the scenery, but in the talking.”
• “The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad--but whiskey!”
• “The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it”
• “The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.”
• “The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice”
• “The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind.”
• “The way it is now, the asylums can hold all the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials”
• “The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.”
• “The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.”
• “The worst thing you can do to a man is to tell him he can have what he wants”
• “Then away out in the woods I heard that kind of a sound that a ghost makes when it wants to tell about something that's on its mind and can't make itself understood, and so can't rest easy in its grave, and has to go about that way every night grieving.”
• “There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”
• “There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.”
• “There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press”
• “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”
• “There are many scapegoats for our blunders, but the most popular one is Providence”
• “There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular is providence”
• “There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it”
• “There are no mistakes in life, there are only lessons to be learned: Adivce to the Youth.”
• “There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined”
• “There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one: keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy”
• “There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.”
• “There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice”
• “There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.”
• “There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency- and a virtue; and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency- and a vice”
• “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.”
• “There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.”
• “There are two forces that can carry light to all corners of the globe - the sun in the heavens and the associated press down here”
• “There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can”
• “There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail”
• “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure”
• “There has been only one Christian. They caught and crucified him early.”
• “There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.”
• “There is a good side and a bad side to most people, and in accordance with your own character and disposition you will bring out one of them and the other will remain a sealed book to you”
• “There is a great deal of human nature in people.”
• “There is a lot to say in her favor, but the other is more interesting.”
• “There is an old-time toast which is golden for its beauty. "When you ascend the hill of prosperity may you not meet a friend.”
• “There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort.”
• “There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress.”
• “There is no end to the laws, and no beginning to the execution of them”
• “There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought --a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
• “There is no humor in heaven.”
• “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist”
• “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.”
• “There is no security in life, only opportunity.”
• “There is no such thing as ''the Queen's English'.' The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!”
• “There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage”
• “There is no use in walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.”
• “There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory”
• “There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.”
• “There is nothing like instances to grow hair on a bald-headed argument.”
• “There is nothing so annoying as a good example!!”
• “There is nothing so annoying as to have two people talking when you're busy interrupting.”
• “There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing”
• “There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me --I always feel that they have not said enough.”
• “There is only one good sex. The female one.”
• “There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it”
• “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
• “There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had its rights”
• “There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labelled as 'American.''”
• “There isn't anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it”
• “There it is: it doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on! somebody to hold in light esteem, somebody to be indifferent about.”
• “There ought to be a room in every house to swear in”
• “There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.”
• “There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”
• “There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”
• “Therein lies the defect of revenge: it's all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.”
• “There's a good spot tucked away somewhere in everybody. You'll be a long time finding it, sometimes.”
• “There's always a hole in theories somewhere if you look close enough.”
• “There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.”
• “There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he is crooked.”
• “They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.”
• “Thrusting my nose firmly between his teeth, I threw him heavily to the ground on top of me”
• “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does all the work”
• “Thunder is good. Thunder is impressive. But it's the lightning does the work.”
• “Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.”
• “To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.”
• “To be busy is man's only happiness.”
• “To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.”
• “To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the on-looking world consent to it is a finer.”
• “To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing”
• “To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.”
• “To eat is human, to digest, divine”
• “To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.”
• “To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals”
• “To make a pledge of any kind is to declare war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man”
• “To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman”
• “To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing”
• “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”
• “To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do”
• “Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience 4000 critics.”
• “Too much of anything is bad, but too much of good whiskey is barely enough.”
• “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”
• “Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except for heaven and hell, and I have only a vague curiosity as concerns one of those.”
• “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
• “Troubles are only mental; it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them”
• “True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god”
• “Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so.”
• “Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.”
• “Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time.”
• “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
• “Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.”
• “Truth is tough. It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay, you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round and full at evening.”
• “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
• “Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”
• “Use the right word and not its second cousin”
• “Vote: The only commodity that is peddleable without a license”
• “Wagner's music is better than it sounds.”
• “War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull”
• “Warm summer sun, shine kindly here. Warm southern wind, blow softly here. Green sod above, lie light, lie light. Good night, dear Heart, Good night, good night.”
• “We [Americans] are the lavishest and showiest and most luxury-loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.”
• “We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.”
• “We all like to see people sea-sick when we are not ourselves.”
• “We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.”
• “We Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world.”
• “We are all alike on the inside”
• “We are all beggars, each in his own way.”
• “We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess”
• “We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.”
• “We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we invented, which was human liberty.”
• “We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.”
• “We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove”
• “We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance - and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain”
• “We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that”

• “We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you.”
• “We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip, may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.”
• “We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy for us”
• “We do no benevolences whose first benefit is not for ourselves”
• “We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves”
• “We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books theoretically, at least.”
• “We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.”
• “We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read”
• “We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain”
• “We have no permanent brains until we are forty. Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up -- and that is one of the main things.”
• “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.”
• “We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.”
• “We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining 10 millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket. And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power.”
• “We have the best government that money can buy.”
• “We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks - if we agree with him”
• “We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talent”
• “We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for ''political influence.'' We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. ''Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?''”
• “We must put up with clothes as they are they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us to advertise what we wear them to conceal.”
• “We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music”
• “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it / and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again / and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”
• “Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it”
• “Well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they can't sleep anyhow.”
• “Well, we can take you to meet Napoleon -- but he's shining the boots of the person who actually was the world's greatest military genius. He happens to have been a tinsmith from Pennsylvania who never had a chance to go to a military academy -- so he never even knew he was a great military genius. He was born with that capacity -- and only here in heaven do we actually know who these people are.”
• “What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.”
• “What a lie it is to call this a free country, where none but the unworthy and undeserving may swear.”
• “What a man misses mostly in heaven is company”
• “What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself”
• “What do you call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, magnanimity, forgiveness? Different results of the one master impulse: the necessity of securing one's self-approval”
• “What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it”
• “What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin”
• “What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows / it must grow; nothing can prevent it.”
• “What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others?”
• “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”
• “What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light.”
• “What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really”
• “What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.”
• “What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.”
• “What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce”
• “What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, mighty scarce. Then let us cherish her; protect her; let us give her our support, our encouragement, our sympathy, ourselves -- if we get a chance.”
• “What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.”
• “Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.”
• “Whatever you say, say it with conviction”
• “What's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?”
• “When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself”
• “When a man is known to have no settled convictions of his own he can't convict other people”
• “When a man's dog turns against him it is time for a wife to pack her trunk and go home to mama”
• “When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.”
• “When a teacher calls a boy by his entire name, it means trouble”
• “When all is said and done, the one sole condition that makes spiritual happiness and preserves it is the absence of doubt”
• “When angry, count four; when very angry, swear”
• “When angry, count to four. When very angry, swear.”
• “When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved”
• “When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know who have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.”
• “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
• “When I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.”
• “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.”
• “When I was younger, I could remember anything whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying . . . soon I [won't] remember anything but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”
• “When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. ... Life on the Mississippi”
• “When in doubt, tell the truth.”
• “When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.”
• “When it's steamboat time, you steam”
• “When one has tasted watermelon he knows what the angels eat”
• “When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know”
• “When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction”
• “When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself”
• “When red-haired people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn”
• “When some men discharge an obligation you can hear the report for miles around”
• “When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?”
• “When the human race has once acquired a superstition nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it”
• “When you are in politics you are in a wasp's nest with a short shirt-tail, as the saying is”
• “When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.”
• “When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain”
• “When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.”
• “Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him until he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
• “Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.”
• “Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.”
• “Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.”
• “Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts”
• “Wherefore being all of one mind, we do highly resolve that government of the grafted by the grafter for the grafter shall not perish from the earth”
• “While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.”
• “Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.”
• “Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?”
• “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 is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved”
• “Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.”
• “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.”
• “Wine is a clog to the pen, not an inspiration”
• “Wit and Humor -- if any difference, it is in duration -- lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage -- the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.”
• “Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.”
• “Wit, by itself, is of little account. It becomes a moment only when grounded on wisdom.”
• “Women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it, that is, married women.”
• “Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself”
• “Words in haste do friendships waste.”
• “Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions”
• “Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”
• “Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.”
• “Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.”
• “Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.”
• “Write without pay until somebody offers to pay”
• “Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one I think it is.”
• “Yes, you are right - I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions”
• “Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.”
• “Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so”
• “You are a coward when you even seem to have backed down from a thing you openly set out to do”
• “You can straighten a worm, but the crook is in him and only waiting”
• “You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
• “You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus”
• “You can't reason with the heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.”
• “You know about transmigration of souls; do you know about transposition of epochs--and bodies?”
• “You see, he was going for the Holy Grail. The boys all took a flier at the Holy Grail now and then. It was a several years' cruise. They always put in the long absence snooping around, in the most conscientious way, though none of them had any idea where the Holy Grail really was, and I don't think any of them actually expected to find it, or would have known what to do with it if he had run across it.”
• “You should never do anything wicked and lay it on your brother, when it is just as convenient to lay it on some other boy”
• “You shouldn't try to teach a pig to sing. You waste your time and it annoys the pig.”
• “You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear”
• “You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.”
• “Zeal and sincerity can carry a new religion further than any other missionary except fire and sword”
• “ If readers recognized that he was an ass, unaware of his own stupidity, ''your work will be a triumph.”
• “A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.”
• “A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public”
• “A crank is someone with a new idea -- until it catches on.”
• “A sin takes on a new and real terror when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out”
• “A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity”
• “Almost any man worthy of his salt would fight to defend his home, but no one ever heard of a man going to war for his boarding house”
• “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
• “an educator in a costume.”
• “Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff.”
• “At bottom he [Carlyle] was probably fond of them [the Americans], but he was always able to conceal it.”
• “Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.”
• “But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
• “Buy land, they're not making it anymore”
• “By his father he is English, by his mother he is American - to my mind the blend which makes the perfect man”
• “By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.”
• “Children have but little charity for one another's defects”
• “Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.”
• “Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.”
• “Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish”
• “Every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution”
• “Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right”
• “Good wine needs no bush; a jug is the thing”
• “Had double chins all the way down to his stomach”
• “He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.”
• “He goes by the brand, yet imagines he goes by the flavor.”
• “He is now rising from affluence to poverty.”
• “Human beings feel dishonor the most, sometimes, when they most deserve it”
• “I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army.”
• “I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts”
• “I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
• “I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.”
• “I like criticism, but it must be my way.”
• “I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with the blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.”
• “I owe a friend a dozen chickens, and I believe it will be cheaper to send eggs instead, and let them develop on the road.”
• “I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.”
• “If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not stay there.”
• “If we had less statesmanship we could get along with fewer battleships”
• “If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.”
• “I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again”
• “In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?”
• “In his private heart no man much respects himself.”
• “In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience.”
• “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”
• “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.”
• “It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.”
• “It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain”
• “It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.”
• “It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off”
• “It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others - and less trouble”
• “It is the creator of wrong; wrong cannot exist until Moral Sense brings it into being”
• “It is wiser to find out than to suppose”
• “It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there”
• “It's better to keep quiet and have people think you stupid, than to talk and confirm it.”
• “It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it hundreds of times.”
• “Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.”
• “Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the 'blessing'' of idleness and won for us the ''curse'' of labor.”
• “Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight - this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one - this is business”
• “Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.”
• “Man is the 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.”
• “Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there.”
• “My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine everybody drinks water”
• “My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies”
• “Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name BZJXXLLWCP is pronounced Jackson.”
• “Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought / by force of circumstances, not argument / to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.”
• “Next to possessing genius one's self is the power of appreciating it in others”
• “Not until you become a stranger to yourself will you be able to make acquaintance with the Friend.”
• “Nothing needs more change than someone else's patterns.”
• “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.”
• “Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most”
• “On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.”
• “One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.”
• “Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value”
• “Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is wrong. There is no other time.”
• “Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness”
• “Our consciences take no notice of pain inflicted on others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to us.”
• “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
• “People born to be hanged are safe in water.”
• “Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead”
• “Remember the Titans.”
• “Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.”
• “Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Don't be fooled by this absurd saw; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him.”
• “Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.”
• “Slang in a woman's mouth is not obscene, it only sounds so”
• “Surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghastly stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease.”
• “The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”
• “The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name”
• “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.”
• “The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines. One tells them from the vinegar by the label.”
• “The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.”
• “The only people I know who still believe in hell are the ones who had the proper kind of upbringing”
• “The so-called human race”
• “The world will not stop and think- it never does, it is not its way; its way is to generalize from a single sample”
• “There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages”
• “There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level”
• “This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.”
• “This old stone tower was very massive--and rather ruinous, too, for it was Roman, and four hundred years old. Yes, and handsome, after a rude fashion, and clothed with ivy from base to summit, as with a shirt of scale mail.”
• “Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered -- either by themselves or by others.”
• “To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology”
• “To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else - these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other cheap and trivial”
• “Virtue has never been as respectable as money”
• “Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.”
• “We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking”
• “We have nine children now half boys and half girls.”
• “We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead / and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.”
• “We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.”
• “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.”
• “When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
• “When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do: throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the quickest.”
• “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
• “You aim for the palace and get drowned in the sewer”
• “You can go to heaven if you want. I'd rather stay in Bermuda.”
• “You can't pray a lie.”
• “You may have noticed that the less I know about a subject the more confidence I have, and the more new light I throw on it.”
• “You ought never to "sass" old people- unless they "sass" you first”
• “You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.”

- Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)