Mark Twain Quotes

The only certainties in life are death and taxes.

I saw a startling sight today, a politician with his hands in his own pockets.

A home without a cat — and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat — may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

There was so much to learn and it was all fun. But the best part was getting a laugh from an audience. That was like drowning in candy.

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

An honest politician is an oxymoron.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

There is nothing like instances to grow hair on a bald-headed argument.

The machine has several virtues... One may lean back in his chair and work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around.

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.

Adam did not want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden.

I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.

He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.

You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.

... the English alphabet is pure insanity..., It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty.

More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

My faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.

None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth.

All people have had ill luck, but Jairus's daughter and Lazarus had the worst.

Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?

It was the schoolboy who said, ""Faith is believing what you know ain't so.""

Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.

The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey!

in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

The future interests me - I'm going to spend the rest of my life there.

He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all.

If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

When all is said and done, the one sole condition that makes spiritual happiness and preserves it is the absence of doubt.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils, but give me the banjo.

Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

There are no standards of taste in wine... Each man's own taste is the standard, and a majority vote cannot decide for him or in any slightest degree affect the supremacy of his own standard.

There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.