Mark Twain

"When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it."

"Humor is mankind's greatest blessing."

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

"A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat."

"Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."

"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it."

"We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter."

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

"Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been."

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

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

"One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke."

"All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure."

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

"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."

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

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

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated."

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

"If books are not good company, where shall I find it?"