Q - Mark Twain
Posted on 28th January 2021
Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens 1835 – 1910, he is best remembered writing under the pen name Mark Twain. As well as being a writer he was also a humourist, publisher, lecturer, inventor and entrepreneur.
His most celebrated writings are ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and its sequel ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’.
‘You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus’
‘It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare’
‘The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up’
‘Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society’
‘Humour is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place’
‘A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval’
‘It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt’
‘Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first’
‘The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter’
‘A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs’
‘My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it’
‘I have never let my schooling interfere with my education’
‘Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge’
‘Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please’
‘If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything’
‘A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read’
‘Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more’
‘Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear’
‘Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter’
‘Do something every day that you don’t want to do, this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain’
‘All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence: then success is sure’
‘He had discovered a great law of human 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 obtain’
‘Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest’
‘Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live’
‘It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not deserve them’
‘Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it
with’
‘Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow’
‘Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see’
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