This Hill, though high, I covet to ascend, The Difficulty will not me offend. For I perceive the Way to life lies here: Come pluck up Heart, let’s neither faint nor fear; Better, though difficult, the Right Way to go, Than Wrong, though easy, where the End is Wo.
Publilius Syrus – select quotes
I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.
~ in Maxims
A good reputation is more valuable than money.
Confession is the next thing to innocency.
Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage.
Never promise more than you can perform.
No one knows what he can do till he tries.
Rule your desires lest your desires rule you.
The greater a man is in power above others, the more he ought to excel them in virtue. None ought to govern who is not better than the governed.
To ask a favor is a kind of slavery.
Spinoza – select quotes
Minds are conquered not by arms, but by greatness of soul.
Bias of Priene – select quotes
Form your plans with deliberations, but execute them with vigor.
It is better to decide a difference between your enemies than your friends; for, in the former case, you will certainly gain a friend, and in the latter lose one.
Genius – select quotes
These are times in which a genius would wish to live. It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed.
~ Abigail Smith Adams
Genius is sorrow’s child.
~ John Adams
Firmness of purpose is one of the most necessary sinews of character, and one of the best instruments of success. Without it, genius wastes its efforst in a maze of inconsistencies.
~ Lord Chesterfield
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
~ Calvin Coolidge
Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius.
~ Charles Darwin, in The Descent of Man, ch. 8
Common sense is genius dressed up in work clothes.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Genius borrows nobly.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Letters and Social Aims
The lucky person passes for a genius.
~ Euripides
Genius without education is like silver in the mine.
~ Benjamin Franklin
Seize this very minute;
What you can do, or dream you can, begin it;
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Only engage and the mind grows heated;
Begin and then the work will be completed.
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Constant effort and frequent mistakes are the stepping stones to genius.
~ Elbert Hubbard
The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same.
~ Aldous Huxley
The secret of genius is to carry the spirit of the child into old age, which mean never losing your enthusiasm.
~ Aldous Huxley
We are all geniuses up to the age of ten.
~ Aldous Huxley
Genius means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.
~ William James
Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see.
~ Arthur Schopenhauer
Here genius lies enshrined.
Here sleep in silent majesty
The monarchs of the mind
~ Inscription in the St. Louis Public Library
Oscar Wilde – select quotes
All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his.
~ in The Importance of Being Earnest
Bachelors should be heavily taxed. It is not fair that some men should be happier than others.
Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all.
Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.
Spies are of no use nowadays. Their profession is over. The newspapers do their work instead.
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob.
__________
RELATED
Charles Haddon Spurgeon – select quotes
There is something exceedingly improving to the mind in a contemplation of the Divinity. It is a subject so vast, that all our thoughts are lost in its immensity; so deep, that our pride is drowned in its infinity. . . . No subject of contemplation will tend more to humble the mind, than thoughts of God. . . . But while the subject humbles the mind, it also expands it. . . . nothing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued investigation of the great subject of the Deity.
~ C. H. Spurgeon, quoted by J.I. Packer in Knowing God
Reading makes the full man, and it is the full man who alone can overflow for the profit of others.
~ in Commenting and Commentaries, 24; quoted in Nettles, Living by Revealed Truth, 158
By perseverance the snail reached the ark.
~ from Salt-Cellars
An ill life will effectually drown the voice of the most eloquent ministry.
Anxiety does not empty tomorrow of its sorrows, but only empties today of its strength.
As sure as God puts His children in the furnace He will be in the furnace with them.
Be masters of your Bibles, brethren, whatever other works you have not searched, be at home with the writings of the prophets and apostles.
Faith is reason at rest in God.
Fiery trials make golden Christians.
Have your heart right with Christ, and he will visit you often, and so turn weekdays into Sundays, meals into sacraments, homes into temples, and earth into heaven.
I do not look for any other means of converting men beyond the simple preaching of the Gospel and the opening of men’s ears to hear it.
If any of you should ask me for an epitome of the Christian religion, I should say that it is in one word — prayer.
It were a sad dishonour to a child of God to be the world’s favourite. It is a very ill omen to hear a wicked world clap its hands and shout ‘Well done’ to the Christian man.
Nobody ever outgrows Scripture; the Book widens and deepens with our years.
Of two evils choose neither.
Our outer life is the test of our inner life; and if the outer life be not purified, rest assured the heart is not changed.
Quietude, which some men cannot abide because it reveals their inward poverty, is as a palace of cedar to the wise, for along its hallowed courts the King in His beauty deigns to walk.
Some people like to read so many [Bible] chapters every day. I would not dissuade them from the practice, but I would rather lay my soul asoak in half a dozen verses all day than rinse my hand in several chapters. Oh, to be bathed in a text of Scripture, and to let it be sucked up in your very soul, till it saturates your heart!
The ministry is a matter which wears the brain and strains the heart, and drains out the life of a man if he attends to it as he should.
Train up a child in the way he should go–but be sure you go that way yourself.
We should pray when we are in a praying mood, for it would be sinful to neglect so fair an opportunity. We should pray when we are not in a proper mood, for it would be dangerous to remain in so unhealthy a condition.
Wisdom is the right use of knowledge. To know is not to be wise. Many men know a great deal, and are all the greater fools for it. There is no fool so great a fool as a knowing fool. But to know how to use knowledge is to have wisdom.
__________
Henry Ward Beecher – select quotes
The worst thing in the world next to anarchy, is government.
~ in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1867
Ignorance is the womb of monsters.
~ in Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1867
A traitor is good fruit to hang from the boughs of the tree of liberty.
Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.
Gratitude is the fairest blossom which springs from the soul.
Remember God’s bounty in the year. String the pearls of His favor. Hide the dark parts, except so far as they are breaking out in light! Give this one day to thanks, to joy, to gratitude!
The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom.
The strength and the happiness of a man consists in finding out the way in which God is going and going in that way, too.
Troubles are the tools by which God fashions us for better things.
__________
Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemons) – select quotes
I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being–that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.
~ in Harper Magazine, Sept. 1899
There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
~ in the New York Tribune, Sept. 27, 1871
Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time his is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the “noblest work of God.”
~ in Letters from the Earth
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 of them.
~ in Following the Equator
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you: the one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.
~ in Following the Equator
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.
~ in Following the Equator
How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.
~ in The Diaries of Adam and Eve
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
~ quoted by Frank Luntz in Words That Work
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain. A close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and rejoice in it as we do when the right word blazes out at us. Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt. It tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn butter that creams the sumac berry.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
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.
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.
Humor 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.
I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
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 of them.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
It’s easy to give up smoking; I’ve done it many times.
It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
It’s not what I don’t understand about the Bible that bothers me; it’s what I do understand that bothers me.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use the editorial we.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter–’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
When in doubt tell the truth.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them–then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Man is the only blushing animal—and the only one that needs to.
__________
Bibliography
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)
General Washington’s Negro Body-Servant (1868)
My Late Senatorial Secretaryship (1868)
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Memoranda (1870-1871)
Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871)
Roughing It (1872)
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)
Sketches New and Old (1875)
Old Times on the Mississippi (1876)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (1876)
A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (1877)
The Invalid’s Story (1877)
Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches (1878)
A Tramp Abroad (1880)
1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (1880)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
The American Claimant (1892)
Merry Tales (1892)
Those Extraordinary Twins (1892)
The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (1893)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)
How to Tell a Story and other Essays (1897)
Following the Equator (1897)
Is He Dead? (1898)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900)
A Salutation Speech From the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth (1900)
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated (1901)
Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany (1901)
To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)
A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902)
A Dog’s Tale (1904)
Extracts from Adam’s Diary (1904)
King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905)
The War Prayer (1905)
The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906)
What Is Man? (1906)
Eve’s Diary (1906)
Christian Science (1907)
A Horse’s Tale (1907)
Is Shakespeare Dead? (1907)
Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909)
Letters from the Earth (1909)
Queen Victoria’s Jubilee (1910)
My Platonic Sweetheart (1912)
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924)
Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935)
Letters from the Earth (1962)
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1969)
Concerning the Jews (1985)
Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. (1992)
The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood (1995)
The Future – select quotes
Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
~ Niels Bohr
The great problem with the future is that we die there. This is why it is so hard to take the future personally, especially the longer future, because that world is suffused with our absence.
~ Steward Brand, in The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility
Real generosity towards the future lies in giving all to the present.
~ Albert Camus
I never think of the future – it comes soon enough.
~ Albert Einstein
Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.
~ Euripides
That Being, who gave me existence, and through almost threescore years has been continually showering his favors upon me, whose very chastisements have been blessings to me ; can I doubt that he loves me? And, if he loves me, can I doubt that he will go on to take care of me, not only here but hereafter? This to some may seem presumption ; to me it appears the best grounded hope ; hope of the future built on experience of the past.
~ Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to George Whitefield 19 June 1764, published in The Works of Benjamin Franklin
Hold fast to the Bible. To the influence of this Book we are indebted for all the progress made in true civilization and to this we must look as our guide in the future.
~ Ulysses S. Grant
In the face of all terror and uncertainty and illusion about the future we gladly point to Jesus and say that he is the future.
~ Theodore W. Jennings, Jr.
The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
– Alan Kay
The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.
~ Gerda Lerner
Every effect must have its cause. The past is the cause of the present, and the present will be the cause of the future. All these are links in the endless chain stretching from the finite to the infinite.
~ Abraham Lincoln, quoted in Herndon’s Life of Lincoln by William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik (New York, Da Capo Press, 1983), p. 354.
Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.
~ Machiavelli
We have staked the whole future of American civilization not upon the power of government. Far from it. We have staked the future on the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, control ourselves, and to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.
~ James Madison
If you want to predict the future of our land, go to school and look around.
~Richard Mitchell, in The Graves of Academe
The stupid speak of the past, the wise of the present, fools of the future.
~ Napoleon Bonaparte
Man is unable to accurately predict events which are but twenty-four hours distant; only the Divine Mind could have foretold the future, centuries before it came to be. Hence, we affirm with the utmost confidence, that the hundreds of fulfilled prophecies in the Bible attest and demonstrate the truth that the Scriptures are the inspired, infallible, inerrant Word of God.
~ A.W. Pink
To make no mistakes is not in the power of man; but from their errors and mistakes, the wise and the good learn wisdom for the future.
~ Plutarch
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
~ George Bernard Shaw
When I pronounce the word Future, the first syllable already belongs to the past.
~ Wislawa Szymborska.
Change is the process by which the future invades our lives.
~ Alvin Toffler
“At some point in his life
there came a shortage
of future”
~ Steve Turner, from the poem “Aging” in Tonight We Will Fake Love
Without forgiveness, there’s no future.
~ Desmond Tutu
No one is less ready for tomorrow than the person who holds the most rigid beliefs about what tomorrow will contain.
~ Watts Wacker, Jim Taylor and Howard Means, Visionary’s Handbook : Nine Paradoxes That Will Shape the Future of Your Business
In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.
~ Andy Warhol
Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.
~ Oscar Wilde
Don’t let the mistakes and disappointments of the past control and direct your future.
~ Zig Ziglar
The future just isn’t what it used to be.
~ Unknown
A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.
~ Honore de Balzac
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