I am only human, although I regret it.

I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Yes – en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’.

Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

Two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind—politics and religion. He doesn’t want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more.

Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.

A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made...

I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done – these are traits of the human race at large.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions,...

It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.

Man is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight

It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others–and less trouble.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity – another man’s, I mean.

It was pitiful for a person born in a wholesome free atmosphere to listen to their humble and hearty outpourings of loyalty toward their king and Church and nobility; as if they had any more...

Like it! Yes—the way I’d like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won’t be rich, and I won’t live in them cussed smothery houses. I like...

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter’s evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and...

There’s one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he’s crooked.

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

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into...

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

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.

I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according...

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his...

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of...

Nature has no originality–I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she...

Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.

It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.

It made one mad, for pleasure; and we could not take our eyes from him, and the looks that went out of our eyes came from our hearts, and their dumb speech was worship.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.

Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else.

Well, everybody does it that way, Huck.””Tom, I am not everybody.

There are two kinds of patriotism — monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government...

I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.

I’ll not go where there is any of that sort of thing going on, again. It’s the sure way, and the only sure way;

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.

Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry.

Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don’t take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help....