Age is an issue of mind over matter.
If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.

—Mark Twain

Age is strictly a case of mind over matter.
If you don’t mind it doesn’t matter.

—Jack Benny

Have a place for everything
and keep the thing somewhere else;
this is not advice, it is merely custom.

I have nothing but contempt for the person who can only find one way to spell a word.

—Thomas Jefferson

It is a damned poor mind indeed that can’t think of at least two ways of spelling any word.

—Andrew Jackson

I don’t give a damn for a man who can spell a word only one way.

—Mark Twain, attributed

As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.

additional notes to his Autobiography, February 7, 1906

I don’t see any use in spelling a word right, and never did. I mean I don’t see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all our clothes alike and cook all dishes alike.

speech in Hartford, Connecticut, May 1875

Following the Equator

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.

—Margot Asquith

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

—Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.

—Oscar Wilde

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

in Winokur, The Portable Curmudgeon Redux

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relations.

Note Books

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.