Mark Twain

“Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”

“It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.”

“If the reader thinks he is done, now, and that this book has no moral to it, he is in error. The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will *have* to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them - if the people you go among suffer by the operation.”

“I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language. I was so impressed with this, that sometimes when she began to empty one of these sentences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”

“A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.”

“Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.”

“A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.”

“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.”

“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.”

“Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.”

“By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity – another man’s, I mean.”

“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”

“It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.”

“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.”

“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.”

“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 to us.”

“Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.”

“This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth--ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!- Letter to J. H. Twichell, 1/29/1901”

“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.”

“We must have a religion — it goes without saying — but my idea is, to have it cut up into forty free sects, so that they will police each other, as had been the case in the United States in my time. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition. That wasn’t law; it wasn’t gospel: it was only an opinion — my opinion, and I was only a man, one man: so it wasn’t worth any more than the pope’s — or any less, for that matter.”

“There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.”

“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”

“When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.”

“The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.”

“The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

“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.”

“There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.”

“The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.”

“Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.”

“You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.”

“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.”

“The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.”

“Just when I thought I was learning how to live, 'twas then I realized I was learning how to die.”

“I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature.”

“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”

“It's easy to make friends, but hard to get rid of them.”

“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 AUTHORperG.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE”

“She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection.”

“A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.”

“Almost every convert runs the risk of catching our civilization... I compassionate missionary, leave China! come home and convert these Christians!”

“Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”

“A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.”

“I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.”

“It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.”

“Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them—and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution--these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little— crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.- "The Chronicle of Young Satan," Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts”

“Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.”

“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 cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.”

“Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.”