Mark Twain

As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

There is this trouble about special providences-namely, there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to be the beneficiary. In the case of the children, the bears, and the prophet, the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, because they got the children.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.

Remark of Dr. Baldwin's, concerning upstarts: We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.

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

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

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can’t knock it out of him.

Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.