Mark Twain

A great, great deal has been said about the weather, but very little has ever been done.

The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you.

To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music.

The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny

The rain ...falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain's affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors, I would drown him.

Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows

Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down-- he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.

The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it.

Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

Genius, like gold and precious stones, _x000D_ is chiefly prized because of its rarity.

Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad.

It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.

We must put up with our clothes as they are - they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us - to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we desire gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.

The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether-Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.

The smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.

Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man.

Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization-one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.

The nation is divided, half patriots and half traitors, and no man can tell which from which.