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....

I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.

he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to...

But old fools is the biggest fools there is.

what is joy without sorrow? what is success without failure? what is a win without a loss? what is health without illness? you have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. there...

Do something everyday that you don’t want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

The weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.

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.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.

Tom’s whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.

All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

It’s spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you’ve got it, you want—oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart...

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

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...

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

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries-the ice storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice...

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...

A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same...