Mark Twain

I have spent most of my life worrying about things that have never happened.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.

I'm a very old man. _x000D_ I've had lots of problems. _x000D_ Most of them never happened..!

None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.

Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once.

If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.

When everyone is looking for gold, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.

You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.

Architects cannot teach nature anything.

For instance, take this sample: he has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race - and of ours - sexual intercourse!It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!

To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin' ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property.

The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another.

In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.