Mark Twain

“Don’t you know what that is? It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you DO want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”

“Don't wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality”

“I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.”

“Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.”

“in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”

“I wonder if God created man because He was disappointed with the monkey.”

“The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.”

“The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.”

“It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.”

“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?”

“I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children.”

“Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET." - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar”

“A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.”

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.”

“When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.”

“Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it.”

“As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.”

“They mourned for his kind of Christianity, and he frankly scoffed at theirs; but both parties went on loving each other just the same.”

“When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.”

“A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.”

“Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.”

“We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.”

“What a curious kind of fool a girl is. Never been licked in school. What's a licking?”

“I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.”

“Evidence ... proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind closed doors and into dark places, and it does not cure it or even diminish it.”

“I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! . . . Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night--and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here--writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzling the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?”

“Principles have no real force except when one is well fed.”

“The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it”

“The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.”

“The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it.”

“Eschew surplusage.”

“It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. ”

“I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.”

“When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!”

“Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance.”

“Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.”

“Are you an American? No, I am not an American. I am the American.”

“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.”

“I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.”

“A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.”

“Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation. ”

“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.”

“I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.”

“Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”

“Сега не съм по-мързелив, отколкото бях преди 40г., но то е защото още преди 40г. бях достигнал крайния предел на мързела. Човек не е в състояние да надхвърли възможностите ти.”

“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.- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar”

“Worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe.”

“In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man”

“It’s not the good that die young, it’s the lucky.”

“First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn't make enough forthem both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started adancing-school; but they didn't know no more how to dance than a kangaroodoes; so the first prance they made the general public jumped in andpranced them out of town. Another time they tried to go at yellocution;but they didn't yellocute long till the audience got up and give them asolid good cussing, and made them skip out.”