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Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

Mark Twain

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Mark Twain
Age: 74 †
Born: 1835
Born: November 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 21
Aphorist
Author
Autobiographer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Teacher
Florida
Missouri
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel L. Clemens
Samuel Clemens
Good
Despite
Like
Parents
Parent
Effort
Teach
Natural
Mimics
Children
Mimicking
Every
Manners

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To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.
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When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.
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You want to be very careful about lying otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught.
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I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
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As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.
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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.
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Heroine: Girl in a book who is saved from drowning by a hero and marries him next week, but if it was to be over again ten years later it is likely she would rather have a life-belt and he would rather have her have it. Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.
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I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.
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I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.
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Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.
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Drop this mean and sordid and selfish devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up something to do that's got some dignity to it! Risk your souls! Risk them in good causes then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform!
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We have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries it is only when we set out to discover the secret of God that our difficulties disappear.
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Names are not always what they seem.
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Great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they perform.
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Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.
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In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
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What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.
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The ancients stole all our ideas from us.
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In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
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Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
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