"A man's character may be learned from..." - Quote by Mark Twain

“It must be well-nigh a maximum of sense to behave so that one escapes being hanged.”

“To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.”

“It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory - and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.”

“He that calls a man ungrateful sums up all the veil that a man can be guilty of.”

“Good and great are seldom in the same man.”

“Men inadvertently comport themselves with nobility when they have grown accustomed to wanting nothing from others and always giving to them.”

“One merit of poetry few persons will deny: it says more and in fewer words than prose.”

“We are like travellers using the cinders of a volcano to roast their eggs. Whilst we see that it always stands ready to clothe what we would say, we cannot avoid the question whether the characters are not significant of themselves.”

“And you who wish to represent by words the form of man and all the aspects of his membrification, relinquish that idea. For the more minutely you describe the more you will confine the mind of the reader, and the more you will keep him from the knowledge of the thing described. And so it is necessary to draw and to describe.”