Quotes to inspire and reflect

Even the clearest and most perfectcircumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman: if you have witnesses, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth.

When I reflect upon the number ofdisagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!—incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.

Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Dying man couldn’t make up his mind which place to go to—both have their advantages, “heaven for climate, hell for company!”

Bill Styles . . . spoke of the low grade of legislative morals. “Kind of discouraging. You see, it’s so hard to find men of a so high type of morals that they’ll stay bought .”

The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from themass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only—not from its privileged classes.

Don’t you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardnessand stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to.

Here I was, in a country where a right tosay how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. . . . I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.

A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.

The difference between the almost -right word& the right word is really a large matter—it’sthe difference between the lightning-bug & thelightning.

I reckon I got to light out for the Territoryahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’sgoing to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’tstand it. I been there before.

I thought a minute, and says to myself, holdon,—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now?No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the sameway I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

It was a close place. I took it up, and held itin my hand. I was trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; personsattempting to find a moral in it will bebanished; persons attempting to find a plot in itwill be shot.

You don’t know about me, without you haveread a book by the name of “The Adventuresof Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. Thatbook was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he toldthe truth, mainly.

What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I . . . against a lawyer?

All the modern inconveniences.

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

In the matter of intellect the ant must bea strangely overrated bird. During manysummers, now, I have watched him, whenI ought to have been in better business, andI have not yet come across a living ant thatseemed to have any more sense than a deadone. I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of those wonderfulSwiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about religion.

Anywhere is better than Paris. Paris the cold, Paris the drizzly, Paris the rainy, Paris theDamnable. More than a hundred years ago, somebody asked Quin, “Did you ever see such a winter in all your life before?” “Yes,” said he, “last summer.” I judge he spent his summer in Paris.

A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as anhonest man in politics shines more than hewould elsewhere.

He [Tom Sawyer] had discovered a great law ofhuman action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great andwise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do andthat Play consists of whatever a body is notobliged to do.

The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by abell; she gits up by a bell—everything’s so awful reg’lar a body can’t stand it.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucketof whitewash and a long-handled brush. Hesurveyed the fence, and all gladness left himand a deep melancholy settled down upon hisspirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feethigh. Life to him seemed hollow, and existencebut a burden.

The chances are that a man cannot get into congress now without resorting to arts and means that should render him unfit to gothere.

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

The Gilded Age.

[ On women in the United States :] They live in the midst of a country where there is no end to the laws and no beginning to the execution of them.

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligenceand honesty, and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity, and perjury.

[ Deleted dedication of Twain’s book RoughingIt:] To the Late Cain, This Book is Dedicated, Not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on accountof sympathy with him, for his bloody deedplaced him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking; but out of a mere humancommiseration for him in that it was hismisfortune to live in a dark age that knew notthe beneficent Insanity Plea.

When the peremptory challenges wereall exhausted, a jury of twelve men wereimpaneled—a jury who swore that they hadneither heard, read, talked about, nor expressedan opinion concerning a murder which thevery cattle in the corrals, the Indians in thesage-brush, and the stones in the street werecognizant of!

To do something, say something, seesomething, before anybody else—these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

If I were settled I would quit all nonsense & swindle some girl into marrying me. But Iwouldn’t expect to be “worthy” of her. I wouldn’t have a girl that I was worthy of. She wouldn’t do. She wouldn’t be respectable enough.

I have often noticed that you shun exertion.There comes the difference between us. I courtexertion. I love work. Why, sir, when I have apiece of work to perform, I go away to myself, sit down in the shade, and muse over thecoming enjoyment.

The serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.

There is no peace in Southern Africa. There is no peace because there is no justice.

Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, letus shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

I don’t adopt any one’s ideas; I have my own.

The drawing shows me at a glance what would be spread over ten pages in a book.

A nihilist is a man who does not bow down before any authority, who does not take any principle on faith, whatever reverence thatprinciple may be enshrined in.

[ On General Douglas MacArthur :] I fired himbecause he wouldn’t respect the authority ofthe President. That’s the answer to that. I didn’t fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that’s not against the lawfor generals. If it was, half to three-quarters ofthem would be in jail.

Now they accuse me of going up and down the Nation on a whistlestop train, and the slogansthat they hurl at me most of the time are “Give’em hell, Harry.” That reputation I did not earn. All I do is to tell them [the Republicans] thetruth, and that hurts a lot worse than giving them hell.

There is nothing new in the world except the history you do not know.

Every segment of our population and every individual has a right to expect from ourGovernment a fair deal.

I’ve just read your lousy review [of a concert by Truman’s daughter, Margaret]. I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an “eight ulcer man on four ulcer pay.” It seems to me that you are afrustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful. When you write such poppycock as was in the back section of the paperyou work for it shows conclusively that you’reoff the beam and at least four of your ulcersare at work. Some day I hope to meet you.When that happens you’ll need a new nose, alot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps asupporter below!

I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities orby outside pressures.