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1 " No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree.2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5.3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.”4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank.5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13.6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14.7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15.8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil.9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19.10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961.11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936.12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 2313) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 2414) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 2818) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions.27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon.28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote " The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" , and 49 years old when he wrote " Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out.33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote " The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out.35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa.36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president.37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels.38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote " The Cat in the Hat" .40) Chesley " Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President "
2 " It smells terrible in here.'Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate. "
― John Kennedy Toole , A Confederacy of Dunces
3 " And I knew in my bones that Emily Dickinson wouldn't have written even one poem if she'd had two howling babies, a husband bent on jamming another one into her, a house to run, a garden to tend, three cows to milk, twenty chickens to feed, and four hired hands to cook for. I knew then why they didn't marry. Emily and Jane and Louisa. I knew and it scared me. I also knew what being lonely was and I didn't want to be lonely my whole life. I didn't want to give up on my words. I didn't want to choose one over the other. Mark Twain didn't have to. Charles Dickens didn't. "
― Jennifer Donnelly , A Northern Light
4 " Even the ugliest person's cellulite is more attractive than the most beautiful supermodel's lower intestine.' I'd put that on a T-shirt but probably Mark Twain already said it. "
― Jenny Lawson , Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
5 " A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. "
― Pete Hamill , Downtown: My Manhattan
6 " ...why is my cat a Muse? the cat has the rare grace of never saying a word too much― Mark Twain ...that's why ... "
7 " Travel is life-changing. That's the promise made by a thousand websites and magazines, by philosophers and writers down the ages. Mark Twain said it was fatal to prejudice, and Thomas Jefferson said it made you wise. Anais Nin observed that " we travel, some of us forever, to seek other states, other lives, other souls." It's all true. Self-transformation is what I sought and what I found. "
8 " Let us be thankful for the fools,' Mark Twain wrote with typically dark humor in 1897. 'But for them the rest of us could not succeed.' Of all the paradoxes of failure in America, surely this is the darkest. Long ago, we saw through old fables of rags to riches; it is still fun to dream, but we know that we are partaking of a cultural myth. But if we do not quite believe in that kind of success, our faith in the myths of failure is unshaken. We are merrily cynical about whether the average tycoon really tugged on those bootstraps, but we still believe with deadly seriousness that the reasons for failure are usually individual-- " in the man." Failure is not the dark side of the American Dream; it is the foundation of it. The American Dream gives each of us the chance to be a born loser. "
9 " Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophants, courtiers, servitors, entertainers. Shakespeare was a sychophant; however, he was and is also a very good poet, and so we continue to read him. "
― Edward Abbey , Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
10 " Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion. "
― Steven Weinberg
11 " Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980) "
― Mark Twain
12 " Even our behavior and emotions seem to have been shaped by a prankster. Why do we crave the very foods that are bad for us but have less desire for pure grains and vegetables? Why do we keep eating when we know we are too fat? And why is our willpower so weak in its attempts to restrain our desires? Why are male and female sexual responses so uncoordinated, instead of being shaped for maximum mutual satisfaction? Why are so many of us constantly anxious, spending our lives, as Mark Twain said, " suffering from tragedies that never occur" ? Finally, why do we find happiness so elusive, with the achievement of each long-pursued goal yielding not contentment, but only a new desire for something still less attainable? The design of our bodies is simultaneously extraordinarily precise and unbelievably slipshod. It is as if the best engineers in the universe took every seventh day off and turned the work over to bumbling amateurs. "
13 " LEARN FROM THE MASTERS: Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like “Show, don’t tell.” Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic. "
14 " Do you know who Samuel Langhorne Clemens is, Antonio?” Bessie asked.“No, chood I?” he said. “He is best known as Mark Twain, the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” she said.“I have herd of the story, but I hav not red the booc,” he said.“Well, you should read it,” she said. “It is excellent reading. An American classic. Mark Twain worked in Schoharie for a while,” she said.“Is that so?” he said.“Yes, he worked as a brakeman on the Schoharie railroad station on Depot Street the winter of 1879, three years after he wrote his famous book,” Bessie said.“Why would he do that, a famos author?” Antonio asked.“A self-published author, I should add. "
― Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini , Antonio's Will
15 " A hypocritical businessman, whose fortune had been the misfortune of many others, told Mark Twain piously, “Before I die I intend to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I want to climb to the top of Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud.” “I have a better idea,” suggested Twain. “Why don’t you stay right at home in Boston and keep them? "
― Mark Twain , The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
16 " Brevity Is Best: Nicknamed " Silent Cal," President Calvin Coolidge was once challenged by a reporter, saying, " I bet someone that I could get more than two words out of you." Coolidge responded, " You lose." The notion of crafting six word memoirs really took off after Smith Magazine shared this poignant one written by Ernest Hemingway: " For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." Pithiness Pays Off For Other Reasons: When required to be brief, for example, we gain clarity about what we really mean -- or have to offer. As Mark Twain once wrote, in a slower-paced time, " I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. "
17 " Novelist Peter de Vries like Adlai Stevenson and Mark Twain has suffered from the American assumption that anyone with a sense of humour is not to be taken seriously. "