Quotes from Mark Twain

I was so hungry. It was against my principles, but I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed...

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

I'm opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

All human rules are more or less idiotic, I suppose. It is best so, no doubt. The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

Why, no one is sane, straight along, year in & year out, & we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, & express themselves in various forms — fortunately harmless forms as a rule — but in whatever form they occur an immense upheaval of feeling can at any time topple us distinctly over the sanity-line for a little while...

Love seems the swiftest but is the slowest of all growths. No man and woman really know what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.

Now that is the way to write — peppery and to the point. Mush-and-milk journalism gives me the fan-tods.

OCTOBER: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The other are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.

She had a slender, small body, but a large heart — a heart so large that everybody's grief and everybody's joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience.

Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.

...fry me an optimist for breakfast.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.

At 50 a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass.

You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought!... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being — that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

Do not put off until tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well.

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

...no circumstances, however dismal, will ever be considered a sufficient excuse for the admission of that last and saddest evidence of intellectual poverty, the Pun.