Mark Twain

There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

Let us endeavor so to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.

Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Don't let schooling interfere with your education.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

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

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

I never smoke to excess - that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time.

Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.

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

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

If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but deteriorate the cat.

When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

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

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

All right, then, I'll go to hell.