"She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die."

"Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all."

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

"The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this."

"The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying."

"Warm summer sun, shine brightly here, Warm Southern wind, blow softly here, Green sod above, lie light, lie light, Good night, dear heart; good night, good night."

"Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward. 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 magician 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. The law of work does seem utterly unfair - but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash also."

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

"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."

"Write what you know."

"Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry."

"I've never let my school interfere with my education."

"I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them."

"Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."

"I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners."Manners!" he said. "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction."

"To be busy is man's only happiness."

"But old fools is the biggest fools there is."

"We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away."

"We are chameleons and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility."

"In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards."

"It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand."

"When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them."

"Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere."

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

"He would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign."

"Looking' his last' upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing 'she' could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips."

"Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden."

"So I learned then, that gold in it's native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that."

"And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars--all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose--there is no such war in the history of the race."

"There isn't a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights."

"I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55."

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

"Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times."

"Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it."

"Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it."

"He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a consul at home."

"The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow."

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life--hence it is a valuable possession to him."

"T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it."

"The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog."

"I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts."

"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."

"When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear."

"I can last two months on a good compliment."

"But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time."

"During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business."

"If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves."

"It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."

"Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."