"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
— Mark Twain

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."
— Mark Twain

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
— Mark Twain

"The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them."
— Mark Twain

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

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life."
— Mark Twain

"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
— Mark Twain

"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."
— Mark Twain

"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
— Mark Twain

"It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt."
— Mark Twain

"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

"Keep away from 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."
— Mark Twain

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

"'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read."
— Mark Twain

"The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
— Mark Twain

"Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be."
— Mark Twain

"Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
— Mark Twain

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said 'I don't know'."
— Mark Twain

"In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them."
— Mark Twain

"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
— Mark Twain

"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't."
— Mark Twain

"Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
— Mark Twain

"Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it."
— Mark Twain

"Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it."
— Mark Twain

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)

"Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been."
— Mark Twain

"Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other."
— Mark Twain

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

"Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident."
— Mark Twain

"If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed."
— Mark Twain

"You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?"
— Mark Twain

"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."
— Mark Twain

"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 by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."
— Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It)

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

"The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for."
— Mark Twain

"I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
— Mark Twain

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."
— Mark Twain

"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."
— Mark Twain

"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear."
— Mark Twain

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

"Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society."
— Mark Twain

"Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else."
— Mark Twain

"I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898"
— Mark Twain

"What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce."
— Mark Twain

"Its not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog."
— Mark Twain

"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain."
— Mark Twain

"I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!"
— Mark Twain

"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
— Mark Twain

"Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty."
— Mark Twain