“Kindness is the language the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
Over the years, we have had several coaching and team building consulting type assignments in academic environments. Recently, I completed a coaching assignment at a major university. It was a gratifying experience through a challenging time and rekindled an affinity for one of my favorite authors, Samuel Clemens.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens is best known by his pen name Mark Twain.
He was an American original. Twain is best remembered as the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He is considered one of the greatest American writers of all time and the father of American literature.
On the heels of this experience, I want to share some wisdom from one of the funniest human beings that ever lived. It is my hope that these might help to add a new positive perspective as we journey into the new year.
Just imagine if Twain had a Twitter account…!
35 Quotes from Mark Twain:
- “The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
- “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
- “A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.”
- “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
- “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
- “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
- “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”
- “I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”
- “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”
- “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
- “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
- “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.”
- “Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of 80 & gradually approach 18.”
- “Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.”
- “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”
- “We have the best government that money can buy.”
- “The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.”
- “I can live for two months on a good compliment.”
- “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”
- “All generalizations are false, including this one.”
- “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
- “Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.”
- “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
- “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
- “No word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”
- “A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.”
- “Name the greatest of all inventors…..Accident.”
- “If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.”
- “Don’t tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.”
- “If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs,
it’s best to eat the biggest one first.” - “There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.”
- “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.”
- “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.”
- “The people who are really great are not those who try to belittle your ambitions, but those who make you feel that you too can become great.”
- “A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
“Let us endeavor so to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry” …Mark Twain
