Mark Twain Quotes

Knighterrantry is a most chuckleheaded trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there is money in it, after all, if you have luck. Not that I would ever engage in it, as a business, for I wouldn't. No sound and legitimate business can be established on a basis of speculation. A successful whirl in the knighterrantry line--now what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It's just a corner in pork, that's all.

We have the best government that money can buy.

Pessimist: The optimist who didn't arrive.

History has tried hard to teach us that we can't have good government under politicians. Now, to go and stick one at the very head of the government couldn't be wise.

Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

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

Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.

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

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

There is no such thing as an ordinary life.

Knowledge becomes wisdom only after it has been put to good use.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.

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

Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.

The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.

Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform. "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for certain that just ain't true." Thinking that you know the future.

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

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.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]

The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.

Tell me about a person's family, friends, and community, and I'll tell you what his opinions are.

Happiness ain't a thing in itself - it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

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

There is in life only one moment and in eternity only one. It is so brief that it is represented by the fleeting of a luminous mote through the thin ray of sunlight - and it is visible but a fraction of a second. The moments that preceded it have been lived, are forgotten and are without value; the moments that have not been lived have no existence and will have no value except in the moment that each shall be lived. While you are asleep you are dead; and whether you stay dead an hour or a billion years the time to you is the same.

Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted.

We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity.

Laws control the lesser man... Right conduct controls the greater one.

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars - all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose - there is no such war in the history of the race."

Great things can happen when you don't care who gets the credit.

I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.

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.

Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.

Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

It is the Creator´s Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief... With these facts before you, now try to guess man´s chiefest pet name for this ferocious Commander-in-Chief? I will save you the trouble but you must not laugh. It is Our Father in Heaven.

I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.

...fry me an optimist for breakfast.

It is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man's.

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.

If ever you've been down in the dumps, hear these iconic authors share with you more than their writing wisdom.