Quotes by Mark Twain
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
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
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah didn't miss the boat.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Truth is the most valuable thing we have, so I try to conserve it.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
God: The most popular scapegoat for our sins.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it if you live.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
I am pushing sixty. That is enough exercise for me.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence then success is sure.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
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
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
I can live for two months on a good compliment.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
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
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
It's good sportsmanship not to pick up lost balls while they are still rolling.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
Link to Quote
Mark Twain Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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