When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it. – Mark Twain
Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it. – Mark Twain
We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. – Mark Twain
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable. – Mark Twain
We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the saying goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march. – Robert Louis Stevenson, “Virginibus Puerisque II,” Virginibus Puerisque, 1881