Mark Twain

The bane of Americans is overwork-and the ruin of any work is a divided interest. Concentrate-concentrate. One thing at a time.

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

Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us - dreamers and indolent... It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich - these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

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

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.

Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from "Disappearance of Literature

The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

He is now rising from affluence to poverty.

There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'