Mark Twain
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.
I continue to find my greatest pleasure, and so my reward, in the work that precedes what the world calls success.
If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.
We shall never know all the good that a simple smile can do.
I have a hobby...I have the world's largest collection of sea shells. I keep it scattered on beaches all over the world. Maybe you've seen some of it...
In times like these, it helps to recall that there have always been times like these.
Pain is just weakness leaving the body.
The best minds are not in government. If any were, business would steal them away.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but…
I hope that when you are my age, you will be able to say as I have been able to say: We lived in freedom. We lived lives that were…
Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Somone lying back getting a wank absolutely should be something we see in cinema.
Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
I'm all in favor of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let's start with typewriters.
If you love somebody, let them go, for if they return, they were always yours. And if they don't, they never were.
What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.
Look not back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around you in awareness.
Exaggeration follows desperation.
You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.
I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth -- I just hate what is being done with it.
Marriage is not a ritual or an end. It is a long, intricate, intimate dance together and nothing matters more than your own sense of balance and your choice of…
I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe…
The crowd makes the ballgame.
One deceit needs many others, and so the whole house is built in the air and must soon come to the ground.
It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.
Men are what their mothers made them.
When the oak is felled the forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown silently by an unnoticed breeze.
If liberty and equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in government to the…
The greatest remedy for anger is delay.
When the oak is felled the forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown silently by an unnoticed breeze.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
If I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out. I'm not proud.
I am not young enough to know everything.
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it.
Sin has many tools, but a lie is the handle which fits them all.
A politician is a statesman who approaches every question with an open mouth.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
An economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn't happen today.
Trust the people. This is the one irrefutable lesson of the entire postwar period contradicting the notion that rigid government controls are essential to economic development.
On life's journey faith is nourishment, virtuous deeds are a shelter, wisdom is the light by day and right mindfulness is the protection by night. If a man lives a…
Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.
Without wearing any mask we are conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.
An unexamined life is not worth living.
The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.
An unexciting truth may be eclipsed by a thrilling lie.
Nothing before had ever made me thoroughly realize, though I had read various scientific books, that science consists in grouping facts so that general laws or conclusions may be drawn…
It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does…
It's not enough to speak, but to speak true.
Where all think alike, no one thinks very much.
The only way to win audiences is to tell people about the life and death of Christ. Every other approach is a waste.
Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.
Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
They always say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.
A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
Today, you always know whether you are on the Internet or on your PC's hard drive. Tomorrow, you will not care and may not even know.
Playing dead not only comes in handy when face to face with a bear, but also at important business meetings.
From such beginnings of governments, what could be expected, but a continual system of war and extortion?
My observation is that whenever one person is found adequate to the discharge of a duty. Iit is worse executed by two persons, and scarcely done at all if three…
If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business.
A riot is the language of the unheard.
You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I'm not hungry enough to eat six.
This does not mean that the enemy is to be allowed to escape. The object is to make him believe that there is a road to safety, and thus prevent…
Life is a fatal complaint, and an eminently contagious one.
Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.
To be pleased with one's limits is a wretched state.
Nobody expects to trust his body overmuch after the age of fifty.
The jaws of power are always open to devour, and her arm is always stretched out, if possible, to destroy the freedom of thinking, speaking, and writing.
The first mistake in public business is the going into it.
Is there anything more beautiful than a beautiful, beautiful flamingo, flying across in front of a beautiful sunset? And he's carrying a beautiful rose in his beak, and also he's…
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
There is no joy in life like the joy of sharing.
We humans do not need to leave Earth to get to a hostile, deadly, alien environment; we already have Miami.
My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.
Women should be obscene and not heard.
Don't take life too seriously; you'll never get out of it alive.
A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age.
Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.