Mark Twain Quotes

I knew a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned forty percent more about cats than the man who didn't.

The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.

Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.

The smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.

Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad.

It's not the parts of the Bible I don't know that worries me...it's the parts that I do.

The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you.

A great, great deal has been said about the weather, but very little has ever been done.

Make your vacation your vocation.

This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast.

Heaven is the very last place to come to rest and don't you be afraid to bet on that!

More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.

...the administration of the law can never go lax where every individual sees to it that it grows not lax in his own case, or in cases which fall under his eyes.

Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.

Next to possessing genius one's self is the power of appreciating it in others.

The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nations, and from the mass of the nation only-not from its privileged classes.

By "trampling upon the helpless abroad" with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, "by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home."

Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.

There isn't any way to libel the human race.

Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?

The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it.

Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance.

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.

Old habits cannot be thrown out the upstairs window. They have to be coaxed downstairs one step at a time.

We laugh and laugh. Then cry and cry- Then feebler laugh, Then die.

To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.

Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.

isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.

The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it-when unpopular.

You must not pay a person a compliment, and then straightway follow it with a criticism.

To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye-what ye say of me is now of no consequence.

By his father he is English, by his mother he is Americanto my mind the blend which makes the perfect man.

To one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.

My axiom is, to succeed in business: avoid my example.

I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.

The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless punctilios and pronounce his name right.

We called him Barney for short. We couldn't use his real name, there wasn't time.

If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is.

Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence- stuffed and in a museum.

The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession-and take the credit of the correction.

It was the most earnest ambition I ever had....Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job.

I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with the blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.

A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is just about as inspiring.

I never did a thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise that I didn't repent of within twenty-four hours.

It is easier to manufacture seven facts out of whole cloth than one emotion.

History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably.

No one has ever seen a Republican mass meeting that was devoid of the perception of the ludicrous.

The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend is immortal

Eternal rest sounds comforting in the pulpit; well, you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands.

And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows