Mark Twain

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

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

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

“Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.”

“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.”

“Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”

“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.”

“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”

“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 the old man had learned in seven year...”

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

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired...”

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

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”

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

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

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