Mark Twain

Very well, then, where do we arrive? Where do we arrive with our respect, our homage, our filial affection? At Adam! At Adam, every time. We can't build a monument to a germ, but we can build one to Adam, who is in the way to turn myth in in fifty years and be entirely forgotten in two hundred. We can build a monument and save his name to the world forever, and we'll do it!

The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.

There's nobody for me to attack in this matter even with soft and gentle ridicule-and I shouldn't ever think of using a grown up weapon in this kind of a nursery. Above all, I couldn't venture to attack the clergymen whom you mention, for I have their habits and live in the same glass house which they are occupying. I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.

India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

There is nothing like instances to grow hair on a bald-headed argument.

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.

His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere.

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

the size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider’s measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it.

It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

Suppose . . . burglars had made entry into this . . . [library]. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress.

I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.

It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

Never run after you own hat - others will be delighted to do it; why spoil their fun?

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Not until you become a stranger to yourself will you be able to make acquaintance with the Friend.