Emotion
All emotion is involuntary when genuine.
And mind you, emotions are among the toughest things in the world to manufacture out of whole cloth; it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion.
Envy
To be envied is the human being's chiefest joy.
Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.
Envy--the only thing which men will sell both body and soul to get.
Evil
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Expectations
A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.
Facts
How empty is theory in the presence of fact!
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. <--Not an actual Twain Quote. He borrowed it from Rudyard Kipling
We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.
For a forgotten fact is news when it comes again.
The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to the heart, and seeing it done.
Fault
No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances
Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you opportunity to commit more.
Fear
Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval--a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death.
Forgiveness
Forget and forgive. This is not difficult, when properly understood. It means you are to forget inconvenient duties, and forgive yourself for forgetting. In time, by rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.
Frankness
We write frankly and fearlessly but then we "modify" before we print.
Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it.
Calling a spade a spade instead of coldly symbolizing it as a snow shovel.
Free Will
Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.
Friendship
When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is built upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.
The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.
Genius
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered--either by themselves or by others.
It is impossible that a genius--at least a literary genius--can ever be discovered by his intimates; they are so close to him that he is out of focus to them and they can't get at his proportions; they can't perceive that there is any considerable difference between his bulk and their own.
Geniuses are people who dash off weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates a man to ineffable speres [sic] far above the vulgar world, & fills his soul with a regal contempt for the gross & sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.
Hunger is the handmaid of genius.
Greatness
To some people it is fatal to be recognized by greatness.
Greed
The man who is born stingy can be taught to give liberally-with his hands; but not with his heart. The man born kind and compassionate can have that disposition crushed down out of sight by embittering experience; but if it were an organ the postmortem would find it in his corpse.
Grief
The size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider's measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it. The king's lost crown is a vast matter to the king but of no consequence to the child. The lost toy is a great matter to the child but in the king's eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about.
Guilt
Men's minds are too ready to excuse guilt in themselves.
Habit
Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
A man may have no bad habits and have worse.
To have nothing the matter with you and no habits is pretty tame, pretty colorless. It is just the way a saint feels, I reckon; it is at least the way he looks. I never could stand a saint.
Happiness
When all is said and done, the one sole condition that makes spiritual happiness and preserves it is the absence of doubt.
Happy is he who forgets (ignores?) what cannot be changed.
Happiness ain't a thing in itself--it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one: keep from telling their happinesses to the unhappy.
Honor
...honor is a harder master than the law.
Public shows of honor are pleasant, but private ones are pleasanter, because they are above suspicion.
On the whole, it is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
Honor knows no statute of limitations.
Hope
It is like any other agriculture: if you hoe it and harrow it and water it enough, you can make three blades of it grow where none grew before. If you've got nothing to plant, the process is slow and difficult, but if you've got a seed of some kind or other--any kind will answer--you get along a good deal faster.
...it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.
Ignorance
The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
Kindness
Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink- under any circumstances.
Lies
Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.
The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a man only tells them with all his might.
In all lies there is wheat among the chaff...
Lie--an abomination before the Lord and an ever present help in time of trouble.
Life
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them.
Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others- his last breath
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
Love
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
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
Love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes--none knows whence--and cannot explain itself.
Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast.
The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain
True love is the only heart disease that is best left to "run on"--the only affection of the heart for which there is no help, and none desired.
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More to come later.
