Mark Twain

“Unconsciously we all have a standard by which we measure other men, and if we examine closely we find that this standard is a very simple one, and is this: we admire them, we envy them, for great qualities we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that. Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.”

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

“Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.”

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”

“Familiarity breeds contempt and children.”

“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.”

“Steal a chicken if you get a chance, Huck, because if you don't want it, someone else does and a good deed ain't never forgotten.”

“A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place.”

“New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.”

“I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.”

“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.”

“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”

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

“When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.”

“Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.”

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

“Human pride is not worthwhile; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it.”

“Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. ”

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

“Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

“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.”

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

“Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.”

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”

“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”

“To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.”

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”

“Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk from Constantinople; a Greek Christian from Crete; an Armenian; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahman from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away for two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of Higher Animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.”

“Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?”

“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.”

“Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.”

“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.”

“Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.”

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

“We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.”

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”

“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.”

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”