Mark Twain

“It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.”

“When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.”

“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”

“I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.”

“Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”

“The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.”

“Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.”

“They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.”

“You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.”

“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.”

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

“Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.”

“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

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

“In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”

“Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.”

“Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.”

“Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.”

“It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”