Quotes by Mark Twain

wooden pedestal

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 self  

Add your own tags  

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 death  

Add your own tags  

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 carpe-diem  death  

Add your own tags  

Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brain. So far you are correct. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat - at least, not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I should judge that a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 insults  

Add your own tags  

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 places  summer  weather  

Add your own tags  

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 conformity  

Add your own tags  

Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 jewelry  diamonds  

Add your own tags  

I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 prejudice  

Add your own tags  

All say, How hard it is that we have to die - a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 death  

Add your own tags  

It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 telephones  christmas  

Add your own tags  

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 age  smiles  wrinkles  

Add your own tags  

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 babies  dental  

Add your own tags  

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 honesty  

Add your own tags  

Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 prayer  

Add your own tags  

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 humor  

Add your own tags  

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 money  

Add your own tags  

Let us abolish policemen who carry clubs and revolvers, and put in a squad of poets armed to the teeth with poems on Spring and Love ... I would start in at once to elevate, purify, and depopulate the red-light district. I would assign the most soulful poets to that district, all heavily armed with their poems ... The plan would be very effective in causing an emigration of the depraved element.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 police  

Add your own tags  

There are many humorous things in the world, among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 civilization  

Add your own tags  

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 conformity  

Add your own tags  

If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape? No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 kindness  

Add your own tags  

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 mankind  cowardice  

Add your own tags  

But when the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 food  

Add your own tags  

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 media  

Add your own tags  

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 perspective  

Add your own tags  

The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 writing  

Add your own tags  

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 age  

Add your own tags  

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 weather  rain  

Add your own tags  

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 religion  

Add your own tags  

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 worry  

Add your own tags  

Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 cows  

Add your own tags  

Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 clothing  

Add your own tags  

Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah didn't miss the boat.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 mankind  

Add your own tags  

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 quotations  

Add your own tags  

I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 tax  rent  

Add your own tags  

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 adversity  

Add your own tags  

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 animal  

Add your own tags  

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 speeches  

Add your own tags  

Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 honesty  

Add your own tags  

In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 night  

Add your own tags  

God: The most popular scapegoat for our sins.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 god  

Add your own tags  

Nothing seems to please a fly so much as to be taken for a currant; and if it can be baked in a cake and palmed off on the unwary, it dies happy.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 insects  

Add your own tags  

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 anger  

Add your own tags  

My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart - a heart so large that everybody's joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 mothers  

Add your own tags  

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 procrastination  

Add your own tags  

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 grammar  

Add your own tags  

Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 courage  

Add your own tags  

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 bicycling  

Add your own tags  

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 opportunities  

Add your own tags  

I am pushing sixty. That is enough exercise for me.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 exercise  

Add your own tags  

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 integrity  

Add your own tags  

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence then success is sure.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 confidence  

Add your own tags  

Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 honesty  

Add your own tags  

There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. The upper class knows very little about it. Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful. Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a "flush." It is enough to make one ashamed of the species.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 poker  

Add your own tags  

It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us - oh infinitely better for us - if the serpent had been forbidden.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 temptation  

Add your own tags  

I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 horses  art  

Add your own tags  

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 literature  

Add your own tags  

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 diet  self-control  

Add your own tags  

Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 education  

Add your own tags  

I can live for two months on a good compliment.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 compliments  

Add your own tags  

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let me label you as they may.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 integrity  

Add your own tags  

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 clothing  

Add your own tags  

Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 golf  

Add your own tags  

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 insults  libraries  

Add your own tags  

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 fear  

Add your own tags  

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 cats  grammar  

Add your own tags  

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 language  

Add your own tags  

To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 smoking  

Add your own tags  

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 intelligence  

Add your own tags  

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 habits  hypocrisy  

Add your own tags  

It's good sportsmanship not to pick up lost balls while they are still rolling.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 golf  

Add your own tags  

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 books  

Add your own tags  

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 quotations  

Add your own tags  

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 birth-control  sex  

Add your own tags  

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 fathers  teenagers  

Add your own tags  

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 patriotism  

Add your own tags  

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 vanity  

Add your own tags  

In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 spring  

Add your own tags  

The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be? It is the same the angels breathe.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 flying  

Add your own tags  

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 spring  

Add your own tags  

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 luck  

Add your own tags  

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 statistics  

Add your own tags  

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 swimming  

Add your own tags  

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? Is it because we are not the person involved?
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 curmudgeon  

Add your own tags  

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 emotions  

Add your own tags  

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 age  

Add your own tags  

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 education  

Add your own tags  

In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 media  

Add your own tags  

October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 money  

Add your own tags  

All religions issue bibles against him, and say most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 perspective  

Add your own tags  

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 science  

Add your own tags  

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 war  

Add your own tags  

Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very;" your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 writing  

Add your own tags  

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes

section label

 government  

Add your own tags