Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) (1835 – 1910)
Better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer.
"My father!" cried Tom, off his guard for the moment. "I trow he cannot speak his own so that any but the swine that kennel in the styes may tell his meaning; and as for learning of any sort soever—"
He looked up and encountered a solemn warning in my Lord St. John's eyes.
He stopped, blushed, then continued low and sadly: "Ah, my malady persecuteth me again, and my mind wandereth. I meant the King's grace no irreverence."
Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. By forever, I mean thirty years.
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
The distant dogs howled, the melancholy kine complained, and the winds went on raging, whilst furious sheets of rain drove along the roof; but the Majesty of England slept on, undisturbed, and the calf did the same, it being a simple creature, and not easily troubled by storms or embarrassed by sleeping with a king.
Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all — the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.
Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will.
A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.
There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.
I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
We are always anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.