Consider well the proportion of things. It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

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.
- Tom Sawyer Abroad

Well, little things can do large work sometimes; a lucifer match can start a small fire that will burn down a metropolis.
- "The Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript." Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3 (University of California Press, 2015)