Mark Twain
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. To live a fulfilled life, we need to keep creating the "what is next", of our lives. Without dreams and goals there is no living, only merely existing, and that is not why we are here.Collection: Dream
Learn from the mistakes of others - you won't live long enough to make them all yourself. He's opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer him the position.Collection: Mistake
To avoid lying, do nothing that needs covering.Collection: Lying
What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.Collection: Funny
To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.Collection: Differences
There are some few people I respect and admire, but I don't think much of the species.Collection: Thinking
I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.Collection: Believe
Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance.Collection: Men
No child should be permitted to grow up without exercise for imagination. It enriches life for him. It makes things wonderful and beautiful.Collection: Beautiful
Next to possessing genius one's self is the power of appreciating it in others.Collection: Power
As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it-it is like hitting a child.Collection: Appreciation
The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.Collection: Race
Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man with his mouth.Collection: Peace
Names are not always what they seem.Collection: Names
The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.Collection: Art
In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.Collection: Boys
The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but the fly comes close.Collection: Funny
I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes.Collection: House
Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.Collection: Funny
It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.Collection: Mistake
Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.Collection: Art
He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.Collection: Sarcastic
I simply can´t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.Collection: Girl
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambition.Collection: Inspirational
How empty is theory in the presence of fact!Collection: Facts
A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in publicCollection: Men
There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell.Collection: Christian
You can't reason someone out of something that they weren't reasoned into in the first place.Collection: Firsts
I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.Collection: Country
He charged nothing for his preaching and it was worth it too.Collection: Inspirational
A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.Collection: Time
I deal with temptation by yielding to it.Collection: Temptation
What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.Collection: Father
Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.Collection: New York
All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.Collection: Book
The secret to getting ahead is getting started.Collection: Procrastination
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.Collection: Integrity
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.Collection: Relationship
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.Collection: Happiness
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.Collection: Graduation
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.Collection: Travel
If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.Collection: Good Morning
Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.Collection: Sarcastic
They did not know it was impossible so they did it.Collection: Law Of Attraction
The world doesn’t owe you anything. It was here first.Collection: Firsts
Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won’t die.Collection: Firsts
Nothing spoils a good story like the arrival of an eyewitness.Collection: Stories
What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.Collection: Real
A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can’t travel any way but sideways and backways.Collection: Country