Mark Twain
(page 6)

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity - another man's I mean.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.

Keep away from 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.

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

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

There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

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