Duties are not performed for duty’s sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty – the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.
Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
I have spent most of my life worrying about things that have never happened.
When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.
The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.
Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.
I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.
Every man has a secret ambition: To outsmart horses, fish and women.
In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn’t know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.
We can’t always have the beautiful aspect of things. Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful and let the others go.
Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.
We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.
I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
Education is what you must acquire without any interference from your schooling.
I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.
Adam was the luckiest man in the world. He had no mother-in-law.
Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor, and give him an appetite like an alligator.
History never repeats itself, but it does often rhyme.
It always happens that when a man seizes upon a neglected and important idea, people inflamed with the same notion crop up all around.