"Life is mostly froth and bubble, Two things stand like stone, Kindness in another's trouble, Courage in your own."

Gordon, Adam Lindsay on life
4 fans of this quote   

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

Twain, Mark on health
12 fans of this quote   

"You cannot depend on your judgments when your imagination is out of focus."

Twain, Mark on imagination
5 fans of this quote   

"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."

Twain, Mark on institutions   

"The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so."

Twain, Mark on knowledge
10 fans of this quote   

"You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus."

Twain, Mark on judgment and judges
4 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   

"I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won t."

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

"One of the striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives."

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

"Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head."

Twain, Mark on life
4 fans of this quote   

"There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought --a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

Twain, Mark on loneliness
11 fans of this quote   

"Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance."

Twain, Mark on moderation
3 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   

"Keep away from small 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."

Twain, Mark on ambition
24 fans of this quote   

"Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes."

Twain, Mark on death
15 fans of this quote   

"Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul."

Twain, Mark on dress
40 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   

"Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

Twain, Mark on faith
23 fans of this quote   

"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."

Twain, Mark on experience
13 fans of this quote   

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it."

Twain, Mark on forgiveness
13 fans of this quote   

"It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either."

Twain, Mark on freedom
9 fans of this quote   

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are."

Twain, Mark on friends and friendship
22 fans of this quote   

"Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with."

Twain, Mark on friends and friendship
20 fans of this quote   

"I did not attend his funeral; but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it. [About a politician who had recently died]"

Twain, Mark on funerals
8 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   

"Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought -- by force of circumstances, not argument -- to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them."

Twain, Mark on nations