“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”
-Mark Twain

Honor is a thing that eventually reveals itself – one way or the other. It is best not to claim too loudly any honor that is not truly ours in solitude of our own contemplation. It is then that we realize that sort of “honor” is little more than hubris and foolishness.

“Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.”
-Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

Pass me that M-80 would ya’?

God Bless America

“…genius itself succeeds only by arduous self-training…to play on the fiddle it is not merely necessary to take a bow and fiddle with it.”
-Mark Twain, “Contributors Club”, Atlantic, January 1877

Genius without repeated and practiced execution is only conceit.

“Now you begin to see, don't you, that distance ain't the thing to judge by, at all; it's the time it takes to go the distance in that counts….It's a matter of proportion, that's what it is; and when you come to gauge a thing's speed by its size, where's your bird and your man and your railroad alongside of a flea?….A flea is just a comet, b'iled down small.”
-Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

In all things, greatness. If you know how to put it in the right perspective.

“All right, then, I'll go to hell”
-Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Condemnation to the banks of hell. If that isn’t a reason to do the right thing, then none exists. Moral courage rarely happens in a church pew.

“Some things you can't find out; but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing; no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.”
-Mark Twain, Eve’s Diary

Give it time, you’ll eventually know how much it is that you’ll never know.

You’ll then have taken the first halting steps toward wisdom.

“If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out; and I don't know but more so.”
-Mark Twain

It’s impossible to know everything, and dangerous to think you do. But to remain curious, there’s the thing.

And if wanting to know as much about everything as you can doesn’t make the world a more interesting place, it might make you more interesting to the world.  

When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence.
-Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad

The writer is best when he is the impostor's worst enemy.

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“If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.”
-Mark Twain, Autobiography

Elections reflect the highest ideals of society, executed by the lowest means of human nature.  

”The rain …falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain's affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors I would drown him.”
-Mark Twain

It doesn't always seem as if everyone gets the justice they deserve, whether it be the sweet justice of a life well-lived or the terrible kind descending down upon the heads of the mean and wicked.

We may not always think it right, but justice, like the rain, will find its way – and will fall upon everyone’s head eventually.