When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world’s daytime dictionaries.

Which is him?” The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the...

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

Look at the tyranny of party– at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty– a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes– and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of...

There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one–on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for the war. The pulpit will–warily and cautiously–object–at first;...

If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.

It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

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

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”[Mark Twain, a Biography]

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

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’.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion–several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest...

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

I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

Yes. And I’m rich now when I think about it. I own myself, and I’m worth eight hundred dollars. I wish I had the money. Then I wouldn’t ever want anything else

It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

People don’t really read your books, they only say they do, to keep you from feeling bad.

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

What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!

You will be more disappointed in life by the things that you do not do than by the things that you do.

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

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can’t tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young...

When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.

Now he found out a new thing–namely, that 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.

Wherever he found his speech growing too modern — which was about every sentence or two — he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as “exceeding sore,” “and it came to pass,” etc., and made things satisfactory again. “And it came to pass” was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible...

I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

He done his level best.Was he a mining on the flat..He done it with a zest..Was he a leading of the choir..He done his level best.If he’d a reg’lar task to do,He never took no rest..Or if ’twas off and on the same..He done his level best.If he was preachin’ on his beat,He’d tramp from...

You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

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...

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The...

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was...

When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition....

The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over...

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had...

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.