Quotes by Mark Twain
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Twain, Mark
Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Twain, Mark
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.
Twain, Mark
Sacred cows make the best hamburgers.
Twain, Mark
Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul.
Twain, Mark
Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah didn't miss the boat.
Twain, Mark
I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes.
Twain, Mark
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.
Twain, Mark
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Twain, Mark
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
Twain, Mark
Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.
Twain, Mark
I can live for two months on a good compliment.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Twain, Mark
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Twain, Mark
There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.
Twain, Mark
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
Twain, Mark
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
Twain, Mark
Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
Twain, Mark
In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
Twain, Mark
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!
Twain, Mark
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Twain, Mark
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."
Twain, Mark
If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.
Twain, Mark
Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
Twain, Mark
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.
Twain, Mark
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Twain, Mark