Mark Twain

Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it

The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.

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

To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

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.

Some things you can't find out; but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing: no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

Look at you in war...There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war.

There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad.

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

Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.

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

It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.

I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schoisched with a step peculiar to myself - and the kangaroo.

I cherish the dreams of yesterday and dare not dwell on the err's of my past whose fate has been long decided, and effect I can not change. For the dreams of yesterday are the challenges of today, and the hope for tomorrow.

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.

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.

No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

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.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. You can "already know for sure" things that could actually impede progress. Always be on the lookout for the things you did not know, that you did not know. Secondly, work on strengthening personal belief that a particular will be achieved regardless of any adversity that may show up, or evidence to the contrary.