Mark Twain Quotes

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.

A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once-not oftener.

A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.

It is wiser to find out than to suppose.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.

A tax is a fine for doing well, a fine is a tax for doing wrong.

The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

There is no security in life, only opportunity.

Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.

To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.

Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn't rich.

A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public

Vote: The only commodity that is peddleable without a license.

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first

If you can't stand solitude, perhaps others find you boring as well.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

The secret of making progress is to get started.

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.

I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate... and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead.

An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music.

Carlyle said 'a lie cannot live.' It shows that he did not know how to tell them.

Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions....there was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.

There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice.

Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.

Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.

It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.

Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.

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.

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

There are no grades of vanity; there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.

Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.