"Buy land, they're not making it anymore."

"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense."

"But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done."

"It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected."

"He had had much experience of physicians, and said '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'."

"I said it was a brutal thing."No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it""

"The dog is a gentleman, I hope to go to his heaven not man's."

"Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?"

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

"I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting."

"The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades."

"Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day."

"I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway."

"Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt."

"The lack of money is the root of all evil."

"Ah, Antonio, it IS the noblest sport that ever was. I would give a year of my life to see it. Is the bull always killed?" "Yes. Sometimes a bull is timid, finding himself in so strange a place, and he stands trembling, or tries to retreat. Then everybody despises him for his cowardice and wants him punished and made ridiculous; so they hough him from behind, and it is the funniest thing in the world to see him hobbling around on his severed legs; the whole vast house goes into hurricanes of laughter over it; I have laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks to see it. When he has furnished..."

"The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the musician with the fiddle-bow in his hand who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him--why, certainly, he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same."

"It is a wise child that knows its own father and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him."

"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."

"It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."

"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."

"The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes."

"I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself."

"At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity."

"Some people scorn a cat and think it not an essential, but the Clemens tribe are not of these."

"What is joy without sorrow? what is success without failure? what is a win without a loss? what is health without illness? you have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. there is always going to be suffering. it's how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, that will define you."

"Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it."

"God created war so that Americans would learn geography."

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."

"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know."

"Then the cow asked:"What is a mirror?""It is a hole in the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy."

"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

"Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option."

"It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense."

"Perfect grammar--persistent, continuous, sustained--is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it."

"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 rather not."

"What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey."

"Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."

"To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph."

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness."

"The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul."

"A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies."

"To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence."

"In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?"

"Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true."

"Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics."

"What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin."

"I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand."

"The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again."

"The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly everybody will side with you when you are in the right."