Mark Twain

"Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out."

"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 story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times."

"Write what you know."

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

"Cuando recordamos que todos somos locos, la vida queda explicada"

"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 window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."

"The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why."

"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."

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

"My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water."

"Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists; all is a dream. God--man--the world--the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars--a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space--and you!"

"Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?"

"′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read."

"The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not."

"During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business"

"Herodotus says, Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects."

"I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other."

"Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog."

"Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge."

"Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education."