Edoardo Gelli's Protrait of Mark Twain, 1904
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.
Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.
The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.
Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential -- there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.
Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
I think a compliment ought to always precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.
Noise proves nothing, Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world -- and never will.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear.
Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly -- a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Why is it that we rejoice at birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.
An American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person he generally selects Mark Twain. - Thomas Edison
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