Mark Twain Site About.com

"All singers have this fault: if asked to sing among their friends they are never so inclined; if unasked they never leave off."
-Horace, Satires I, III.1-3, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough

"Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something."
-Pancho Villa, last words

"Memory believes before knowing remembers."
-William Faulkner

"Redwine had climbed up to the pulpit in order simply to be as happy as possible."
-Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

"Tell all the truth, but tell it slant."
-Emily Dickenson

"Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice Doggy’ until you can find a rock."
-Will Rogers

"It can be very dangerous to see things from somebody else’s point of view without the proper training."
-Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless

"’History’ writes Bokonon. ‘Read it and weep.’"
-Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s Cradle

"God never wrote a good play in his life."
-Kurt Vonnegut

"I am, some how, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops."
-Stephen J. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb

"Science is just organized common sense."
-Thomas Henry Huxley

"Nature hath fram’d strange fellows in her time: Some that will evermore peep through their eyes And laugh like parrots at a bag-piper,"
-William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, I.i.51-53

"I can play the fiddle, I just don’t know how."
-Tim Singleton

"Work is something you have to do, play is something you want to do."
-Mark Twain

"Being alive is a crock of shit."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

"A wise man ought always to follow the paths beaten by great men, and to imitate those who have been supreme, so that if their ability does not equal theirs, at least it will savour of it."
-Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince

"They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them."
-Eeyore, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"You can’t help respecting anybody who can spell Tuesday, even if he doesn’t spell it right."
-Rabbit, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"We can’t all, and some of us don’t. That’s all there is to it."
-Eeyore, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"Brains first and then Hard Work."
-Eeyore, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"Nobody can be uncheered with a balloon."
-Winnie-the-Pooh, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you."
-Winnie-the-Pooh, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"Spelling isn’t everything. There are days when spelling Tuesday simply doesn’t count."
-Rabbit, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"It’s so much more friendly with two."
-Piglet, Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"Don’t underestimate the value of Doing Nothing, of just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering."
- Pooh’s Little Instruction Book

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are in confederacy against him."
-Jonathan Swift

"What is there left for us that have seen the newly discovered stability of things changed from enthusiasm to a weariness … but to rediscover an art of the theatre which shall be joyful, fantastic, extravagant, whimsical, beautiful, resonant and altogether reckless…"
-W. B. Yeats

"Perfection offends me."
-Tristan Thayer

"If the paintings are too large, cut them in half!"
-Frank Lloyd Write about the low ceilings in the Guggenheim

"You are a great orator, Thersites, we know, ready to say anything—but hold your tongue now, you had better not defy princes in a minority of one!"
-Odysseus, Homer’s The Iliad, translated by W. H. D. Rouse

"’Got any Maple Syrup for sale?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Man up the road told us you did have.’ ‘He talks too much!’"
-"Yup…Nope" And Other Vermont Dialogues

"’Think it’s ever going to stop snowing?’ ‘It always has.’"
-"Yup…Nope" And Other Vermont Dialogues

"’That Poultney road sign back at the corner is pointing in the wrong direction, isn’t it?’ ‘Sure it is. But any damn fool knows how to get to Poultney.’"
-"Yup…Nope" And Other Vermont Dialogues

"The surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that it has never tried to contact us."
-Bill Waterson

"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."
-Rich Cook

"Only two things in the Universe are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former."
-Albert Einstein

"Don’t follow trends, start trends."
-Frank Capra

"Were I (Who to my cost already am One of those strange prodigious creatures Man.) A spirit free, to choose for my own share, What Case of Flesh, and Blood, I pleas’d to weare, I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear. Or any thing but that Vain Animal, Who is so proud of being rational."
-John Wilmont, Earl of Rochester, opening to "A Satyr against Mankind"

"Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe."
-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

"All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental."
-Kurt Vonnegut, Timequake

"Entropy isn’t what it used to be."
-Sign

"God didn’t create the world in seven days. He rested for six and pulled an all-nighter."
-Sign

"A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither."
-Thomas Jefferson

"Maybe Jesus was right when he said that the meek shall inherit the earth—but they inherit very small plots, about six feet by three."
-Lazarus Long, Time Enough For Love

"…we do not carry weapons to give us Dutch courage. If a gun makes you feel three meters tall and invulnerable, you had better go unarmed and let your sister do any shooting that’s necessary."
-Lazarus Long

" Hold it to be the inalienable right of anybody to go to hell in his own way."
-Robert Frost

"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We have all come here in different ships, but we’re in the same boat now."
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I think it looks very unpresidential of George Bush to be cutting and running like this, but, then, if I’d ruined the economy in just four years, I’d probably be hiding too."
-Clinton campaign official on Bush’s refusal to agree to debates

"We will make you King, they said. I am King already, Death answered. We will paint your likeness on all the money of the world. It is there already, Death answered. We adore you and will not live without you, the businessmen said. Death said, I will consider your offer."
-Stephen Dobyns

"The mind is its own place, and in it self Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n."
-John Milton, Paradise Lost I, 254-255

"We got boats on boats, boats under boats, boats in boats, boats on docks, boats under docks, docks on boats … It’s a real mess."
-Florida salvor on the wake of Hurricane Andrew

"Son, all the beautiful, intelligent, healthy young women are taken. It’s a basic law of the universe, and if you don’t like it, go somewhere else."
-Ken Johnson’s dad

"If you’re going to make a mistake, you might as well make it going 100 miles an hour."
-Rick Lantz, Virginia football defensive coordinator

"Yeah, well, there are all kinds of people who are full of shit making a lot of money—I’m not going to be the exception."
-John Cusack, Tapeheads

"In cyberspace, the lunatics not only run the asylum, but they helped build it, which may explain why no one has been able to shut down or control it."
-Richard Kadry, Wired Magazine

"Your case will be decided by twelve people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty."
-Norman Yarvin

"There is no place in New York for Columbia University and it’s Marching Band."
-Ed Koch, former New York City mayor

"Terminally ill with cancer, Colombian defender Andres Escobar knocks the ball into his own goal on the advice of his doctor, Jack Kevorkian."
-caption in the Washington Post

"Well, dinner would have been splendid … if the wine had been as cold as the soup, the beef as rare as the service, the brandy as old as the fish and the maid as willing as the Duchess."
-Winston Churchill

"When you start to feel you’ve been bit by an eel—That’s a moray…"
-Scott Brigham

"Money isn’t everything. I’ve got money and I’ve got everything, and they’re not the same."
-Robert Maxwell

"Sick days are the same as vacations, but with sound effects."
-Dogbert, Scott Adam’s Dilbert

"Men Wanted for Dangerous Expedition: Low Wages for Long Hours of Arduous Labour under Brutal Conditions; Months of Continual Darkness and Extreme Cold; Great Risk to Life and Limb from Disease, Accidents and Other Hazards; Small Chance of Fame in Case of Success."
-Sir Ernest Shackleton, explorer

"Black as hell, strong as death and sweet as love."
-traditional Turkish description of good coffee

"Let’s assume, ladies and gentlemen, that man isn’t stupid. (For indeed, if we say he is stupid, whom will we be able to call intelligent?) But even if he isn’t stupid, he is still monstrously ungrateful. Phenomenally so! I would even say that the best definition of man is: ungrateful biped. But this is still not his main defect. His main defect is his chronic perversity, and affliction from which he has suffered throughout history, from the Flood through the Schleswig-Holstein crisis."
-F. Dosoyevsky, Notes From Underground

"Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair."
-Burke

"Presume not that I am the thing I was."
-William Shakespeare, II Henry IV

"Married couples who love each other tell each other a thousand things without talking."
-Chinese Proverb

"A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person."
-Mignon McLaughlin

"There are people who would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love."
-Fracois de la Rouchefoucauld

"There is only one sort of love, but there are a thousand copies."
-Francois de la Rouchefoucauld

"Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence."
-H. L. Mencken

"Love cannot endure indifference. It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, it needs to be fed out of the oil of another’s heart, or its flame burns low."
-Henry Ward Beecher

"Love is a medicine for the sickness of the world; a prescription often given, too rarely taken."
-Karl Menninger

"We love the things we love for what they are."
-Robert Frost

"All love is sweet, given or returned. Common as light is love, and its familiar voice wearies not ever."
-Percy Bysshe Shelley

"At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet."
-Plato

"The difficulty with marriage is that we fall in love with a personality, but must live with a character."
-Peter DeVries

"The rose speaks of love silently, in a language known only to the heart."
-Unknown

"Absence is to love what wind is to fire; it extinguishes the small, it inflames the great."
-Bussy-Rabutin

"I would like to have engraved inside every wedding band, ‘Be kind to one another.’ This is the Golden Rule of marriage and the secret of making love last through the years."
-Randolph Roy

"A heart that loves is always young."
-Greek Proverb

"I loved and held you for all those years. Now you could fill a swimming pool with my tears. I thought it would kill me … But I am alive."
-Jackson Browne

"Men have died from time to time, and the worms have eaten ‘em, but not for love."
-William Shakespeare

"Never judge someone by who he’s in love with; judge him by his friends. People fall in love with the most appalling people."
-Cynthia Heimel

"We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love—first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage."
-Albert Camus

"Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start…"
-Ernest Hemingway

"Remember them as they were and write them off."
-Ernest Hemingway

"One can ‘never’ have a guarantee—and definitely no money back."
-Laylah Silva

"From now on I’m going to wear all of the colors of the rainbow, and fall in love with someone who fancies me for a change."
-Fiona, Four Weddings and a Funeral

"Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless. Love and hate don’t stand a chance against it."
-Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen

"On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points."
-Virginia Woolf, The Waves

"He jests at scars, who never felt a wound."
-William Shakespeare

"Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy."
-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crackup

"Life is a zoo in a jungle."
-Peter DeVries

"A man is a god in ruins."
-Emerson, Nature

"It is the final proof of God’s omnipotence that he needed not exist in order to save us."
-Peter DeVries, The Mackerel Plaza

"Work to survive, survive by consuming, survive to consume; the hellish cycle is complete."
-Raoul Vaneigem

"May some god grant us the power to resign from everything, to betray everything, the audacity of an unspeakable cowardice."
-B. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

"I gave myself to know wisdom … I perceived that this vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief; and he that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow."
-Ecclesiastes 1:17-8

"The Lord’s angel, Gabriel, dictated the Koran to Mohammed to Lord’s Prophet. What a joke if all that holy book were only twenty-three years of listening to the desert. A desert which has no voice."
-Thomas Pynchon, V

"She drove like one of the damned on holiday."
-Thomas Pynchon

"No one really listens to anyone else, and if you try it for a while you’ll see why."
-Mignon McLaughlin

"I never think of the future. It comes soon enough."
-Albert Einstein

"It’s not that life is so short, it’s just that you’re dead for so long."
-No Fear Slogan

"Don’t forget until too late that the business of life is not business, but living."
-B. C. Forbes

"A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
-Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

"When the best way out is always through."
-Robert Frost

"We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse."
-Rudyard Kipling

"Never let anyone out-train you."
-traditional

"We will either find a way or make one."
-Hannibal (attributed)

"Just trust yourself, then you will know how to live."
-Goethe

"Nobody will fly for a thousand years!"
-Wilbur Wright, 1901

"Send lawyers, guns, and money. The shit has hit the fan."
-Warren Zevon

"Children should neither be seen nor heard from—ever again."
-W. C. Fields

"I have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it."
-Groucho Marx

"God will pardon me. It is his trade."
-Heinrich Heine, last words

"Drink to me."
-Pablo Picasso, last words

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
-George Bernard Shaw

"I’m still living, and that’s enough for me."
-Larry Fishburne, Boys N the Hood

"In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"A good indignation brings out all one’s powers."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I guess it’s just natural to try and forget the bad things that happen. You never really do, though."
-Brian, Kalifornia "Playing DOOM cooperatively is like trying to coordinate a fire team of deaf people with tunnel vision."
-Calvin Lott

"Ordinarily he was insane, but he had lucid moments when he was merely stupid."
-Heinrich Heine

"That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions, and were it not assumed, the most impossible of conclusions."
-George Santayana

"People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven’t what they want that they really don’t want it."
-Ogden Nash

"…I would not engage the wombat in any form of mortal combat."
-Ogden Nash

"It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier."
-Lazarus Long, Notebooks

"You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once."
-Lazarus Long

"Do not confuse ‘duty’ with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect. But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants ‘just a few minutes of your time, please—this won’t take long.’ Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few."
-Lazarus Long

"Whatever games are played with us, we must play no games with ourselves, but deal in our privacy with the last honesty and truth."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Summer, that beautiful green bitch is back."
-Stephen King

"The trouble with born-again Christians s that they are an even bigger pain the second time around."
-Herb Caen

"The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
-Thomas Jefferson

"I know of no safe repository of the ultimate power of society but the people. And if we think them not enlightened enough, the remedy is not to take power from them, but to inform them by education."
-Thomas Jefferson

"A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take form you everything you have."
-Gerald Ford.

"Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard."
-H. L. Mencken

"We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money."
-Congressman Davy Crockett

"A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Take care to get what you like, or you will be forced to like what you get."
-George Bernard Shaw

"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
-Benjamin Franklin

"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in."
-Greene

"We did not inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrowed it form our children."
-Lakota Indian saying

"Treasure each other in the recognition that we do not know how long we shall have each other."
-Joshua Loth Liebman

"We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open."
-Harry Edwards

"I always knew when I looked back on the tears, there would be laughter, but I never know when I looked back on the laughter, there would be tears."
-Unknown

"We are all winding down this path we call life, heading for the same goal. The only difference is some may walk, some run, some skip, and there are those occasional few who will fly."
-Katie Enright

"A hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the kind of car I drove … But the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child."
-Unknown

"The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity."
-Mark Twain

"Can’t this wait ‘till I’m old? Can’t I live while I’m young?"
-Phish

"Continue to be yourself because in the end that’s what people will remember about you."
-Walter Scott

"It’s better to make a mistake with the full force of your being than to carefully avoid mistakes with a trembling spirit."
-Dan Millman

"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever."
-Dan Reida

"Many roads lead to almost any Rome."
-Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda’s Thumb

"The internet stuff is spooky. I am of course not on line. I do remember ham radio operators though, usually in attics or basements, pallid, unsociable, and obsessed, inhabiting a spirit world, and harmless."
-Kurt Vonnegut

"Of all the words of Mice and Men the saddest are: it might have been."
-Kurt Vonnegut

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

"I look forward to a life of complete immaturity, directly followed by death."
-Mike Fredrick

"There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority... feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, and light the fuse."
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

"Time is but a stream to go fishing in."
-Thoreau

"There is a fine art to sauntering."
-Thoreau

"Jesting oft cuts hard knots more forcefully and effectively than gravity."
-Horace, Satires I, X.14-15, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough

"whatever I say will or will not be."
-Horace, Satires II, V.59, translated by H. Rushton Fairclough

"Carpe Diem"
-Horace, "Horrida tempestas"