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

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.

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education....

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Children have but little charity for each other’s defects.

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

One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it;

You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel

A few fly bites cannot stop a spirited horse.

At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on there clothes to keep them from being stolen.

Never put off till tomorrow what can be done the day after tomorrow just as well

You can’t trust quotes on this site. They don’t require sources, and many things are misattributed.

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...

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories—...

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn’t.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Experience is an author’s most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

Looking’ his last’ upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing ‘she’ could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going...

That which I have seen, in that one little moment will never go out from my memory, but will abide there; and I shall see it all the days, and dream of it all the...

The preacher who casts a vote for conscience’ sake, runs the risk of starving.

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much...

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

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

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Cuando recordamos que todos somos locos, la vida queda explicada

Loose and forbear!

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but...

He had had much experience of physicians, and said ‘the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not’.

Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

I deserve it all. Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know–there’s a grave somewhere for me. The world may go on just as its always done, and take everything from me–loved...

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he...

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare.

Children and fools always speak the truth.

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

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

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let’s go on trying.