Mark Twain's Advice to Youth

1. Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run, because if you don't they will make you. Most parents think thye know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.

2. Be respectful to your supervisors, if you have any, also to strangers, and sometimes to others. Always avoid violence; in this age of charity and kindliness, the times has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

3. Go to bed early and get up early - this is wise. It gives you a splendid reputation with everybody to know that you get up with the lark.

4. You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. Once caught, you can never again be, in the eyes of the good and the pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently through a single clumsy and illfinished lie, the result of carelessness borne of incomplete training.

5. Never handle firearms carelessly. The sorrow and suffering that have been caused through the innocent but heedless handling of firearms by the young.

6. Be careful in your selection of books, and confine yourselves exclusively to good ones.