Mark Twain

"In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."

"There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that."

"There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous andshallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what youknow ain't so'."

"What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so."

"A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory."

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

"I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened."

"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."

"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?"