Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by the pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, and essayist. He was praised as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced", with William Faulkner calling him "the father of American literature". Twain's novels include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), with the latter often called the "Great American Novel". He also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and cowrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner. The novelist Ernest Hemingway claimed that "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn."

Quotes

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

Self Esteem
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.

Duty
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Habits
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
When you cannot get a compliment any other way pay yourself one.
When in doubt, tell the truth.

Honesty
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

Conservatives, Liberals
[He was] a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it....
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
I am prepared to meet anyone, but whether anyone is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence -- and then success is sure.
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly. I said, "I don't know."
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
There is nothing so annoying as to have two people talking when you're busy interrupting.

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