Mark Twain Quotes

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

[I] shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon second thought, I will not use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading--though to speak truly I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it.

for business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.

Wit and Humor - if any difference, it is in duration - lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage - the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.

There are three kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, and statisticians

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

Homely truth is unpalatable.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

The only certainties in life are death and taxes.

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose application of the word. Consider the flea! - incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.

A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can't travel any way but sideways and backways.

There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.

When a teacher calls a boy by his entire name, it means trouble.

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

I am content to be a bric-a-bracker and a Ceramiker.

I have no liking for novels or stories - none in the world; and so, whenever I read one - which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book - my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valuless. Are you saying "You have written stories yourself." Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.

Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate.

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

I am only human, although I regret it.

Not until you become a stranger to yourself will you be able to make acquaintance with the Friend.

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.

Quitting smoking is easy, I've done it hundreds of times.

How slow and still the time did drag along.

In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.

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

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man - with his mouth.

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Seventy is old enough. After that there is too much risk.

You should never trust a man who has only one way to spell a word.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; ... I should be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life.

You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs.

I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.

In other localities certain places in the streams are much better than others, but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere.

Geological time is not money.

Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization-one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?

The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice.

Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on.

Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.

A private should preserve a respectful attitude toward his superiors, and should seldom or never proceed so far as to offer suggestions to his general in the field. If the battle is not being conducted to suit him, it is better for him to resign. By the etiquette of war, it is permitted to none below the rank of newspaper correspondent to dictate to the general in the field.

If I'd seen a playwright ever write an' play at the same time, I'd have given 'em more of a chance at cards. Can I get an 'amen?'

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

Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

Your actions speak so much louder than words.

The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing, it is the thing to watch over and care for and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous. . . .