Mark Twain

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

“There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer them, or turn them into literature.”

“I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.”

“Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.”

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

“Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

“Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.”

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

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

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”

“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. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

“The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.”

“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.”

“I don't want no better book than what your face is.”

“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.”

“The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven.”

“One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.”

“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.”

“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

“But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of therest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.”

“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.”

“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. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”

“If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”

“When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.”

“Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.”

“Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.”

“Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.”

“Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”

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

“Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.”

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”

“Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.”

“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

“You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool.”

“The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.”

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

“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.”

“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

“I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.”

“There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.”

“It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.”

“To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;”

“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 non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”

“What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.”

“the size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider’s measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it.”

“Well, mamma, the Indians believed they knew, but now we know they were wrong. By and by it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray that there might be a God and a heaven – or something better.”

“there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations”

“He said that man’s heart was the only bad heart in the animal kingdom; that man was the only animal capable of feeling malice, envy, vindictiveness, revengefulness, hatred, selfishness, the only animal that loves drunkenness, almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness and a filthy habitation, the sole animal in whom was fully developed the base instinct called patriotism, the sole animal that robs, persecutes, oppresses and kills members of his own tribe, the sole animal that steals and enslaves the members of any tribe.”