Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), 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 Americans literature”. His 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." Twain also wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) and Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), and co-wrote The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) with Charles Dudley Warner.
Here are some of his top quotes:
1. "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why."
2. "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do."
3. "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear."
4. "Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
5. "The secret of getting ahead is getting started."
6. "Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see."
7. "Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first."
8. "If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything."
9. "The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it."
10. "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."
11. "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow."
12. "The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time."
13. "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."
14. "The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up."
15. "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog."
16. "Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable."
17. "The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter."
18. "To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence."
19. "Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest."
20. "A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."
Mark Twain's quotes often blend humor with profound insights about life, human nature, and society.