Mark Twain

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.

If you have to swallow a frog, don't stare at it too long.

But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.

Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.

I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.

The ability to find solutions to life's challenges is what makes us grow as a person.

Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.

What's the use you learning to do right , when it's troublesome to do right and it ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

To write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.

Ah, if he could only die temporarily!

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.

Additional problems are the offspring of poor solutions.

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.

I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.