Mark Twain

If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

Yes - en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

If I had more time, I would have written less.

He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person.

The more I know people, the more I love my dog.

To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn't rich.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Independence-is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.

But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most, our one fellow and brother who most needed a friend yet had not a single one, the one sinner among us all who had the highest and clearest right to every Christian's daily and nightly prayers, for the plain and unassailable reason that his was the first and greatest need, he being among sinners the supremest?

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, political, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.