"There are always difficulties arising that tempt you to believe your critics are right."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on difficulties
31 fans of this quote   

"A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants."

Twain, Mark on lies and lying
13 fans of this quote   

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

Twain, Mark on politics
7 fans of this quote   

"Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."

Twain, Mark on procrastination
9 fans of this quote   

"When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself."

Twain, Mark on respectability
3 fans of this quote   

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

Twain, Mark on secrets
10 fans of this quote   

"We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it's what he descends to that shames the human race."

Twain, Mark on success
9 fans of this quote   

"Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."

Twain, Mark on certainty
9 fans of this quote   

"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up."

Twain, Mark on cheerfulness
9 fans of this quote   

"Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it."

Twain, Mark on truth
5 fans of this quote   

"Never learn to do anything. If you don't learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you."

Twain, Mark on learning
4 fans of this quote   

"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."

Twain, Mark on knowledge
16 fans of this quote   

"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."

Twain, Mark on death
12 fans of this quote   

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

Twain, Mark on facts
43 fans of this quote   

"The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes."

Twain, Mark on age and aging
6 fans of this quote   

"Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person."

Twain, Mark on ancestry
5 fans of this quote   

"History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal."

Twain, Mark on history and historians
18 fans of this quote   

"There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce."

Twain, Mark on humankind
4 fans of this quote   

"I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it."

Twain, Mark on ignorance
3 fans of this quote   

"The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot."

Twain, Mark on intelligence and intellectuals
7 fans of this quote   

"We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter."

Twain, Mark on knowledge
4 fans of this quote   

"There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it."

Twain, Mark on vanity