A Shrine to Samuel Clemens

When I don't want to do something, I often read Mark Twain quotes instead.

"It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us--oh infinitely better for us--if the serpent had been forbidden."
-Notebook

"After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her."
-Adam's Diary

"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. 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."
-Letter

"Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any."
- Advice to Young People speech, 15 April 1882

On the Afterlife: "I am silent on the subject because of necessity. I have friends in both places."
- quoted in Mark Twain, His Life and Work, Will Clemens

"You can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you."
- 70th birthday speech, 1905

"We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty."
- Foreign Critics speech, 1890

On Angels: "They are always on deck when there is a miracle to the fore -- so as to get up in the picture, perhaps."
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

On Antiques: "There are rest and healing in the contemplation of antiquities."
- Life on the Mississippi

"Whenever I take up "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility," I feel like a barkeeper entering the Kingdom of Heaven. I mean, I feel as he would probably feel, would almost certainly feel. I am quite sure I know what his sensations would be -- and his private comments. He would be certain to curl his lip, as those ultra-good Presbyterians went filing self-complacently along. ...She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see."
- "Jane Austen," published in 2009 in Who Is Mark Twain?