Mark Twain Quotes

You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught.

I have tried getting up early, and I have tried getting up late-and the latter agrees with me best.

Not a single right is indestructible: a new might can at any time abolish it, hence, man possesses not a single permanent right. God is Might (and He is shifty, malicious, and uncertain).

Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.

Great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they perform.

One day man by the slow processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and high - some billions of years hence, say.

A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.

What's your name?" "Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer." "That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?" "Yes

I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't know why.

I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way.

To say a compliment well is a high art and few possess it.

That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.

Wilson stopped and stood silent. Inattention dies a quick and sure death when a speaker does that.

Man proposes, but God blocks the game.

It is not best to use our morals weekdays, it gets them out of repair for Sunday.

The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might.

All our acts, reasoned and unreasoned, are selfish

Human nature is the same everywhere; it deifies success, it has nothing but scorn for defeat.

The Bible is a wonderful book; you can prove anything you want with it.

Wherefore being all of one mind, we do highly resolve that government of the grafted by the grafter for the grafter shall not perish from the earth.

The real yellow peril: Gold.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142.

These people´s God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible´s statues. He breaks every one of them himself, adultery and all.

Italy is the home of art and swindling; home of religion and moral rottenness

We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it's what he descends to that shames the human race.

Humor is man's greatest blessing.

It is curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing, nickel-plated word has for you.

To avoid being drawn into error, keep a firm grip on the truth.

Life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and happenings.

You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year.

Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists

When angry, count to a hundred.

Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.

God pours out love upon all with a lavish hand -- but He reserves vengeance for His very own.

We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than Heredity Privilege.

My experience with horses is that they never throw away a chance to go lame.

A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.

Going to law is losing a cow for the sake of a cat.

The xmas holidays have this high value: that they remind Forgetters of the Forgotten, & repair damaged relationships.

All saints can do miracles, but few of them can keep a hotel.

Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures?

Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.

I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible.

Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.