To do right is wonderful. To teach others to do right is even more wonderful--and much easier.

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.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

We never knew an ignorant person yet but was prejudiced.

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]