Mark Twain Quotes

A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart.

Preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty.

Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize India with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of Wonders.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot

His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.

Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.

That which was hard to endure is sweet to remember.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes.

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients - no, three, I think - yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

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

But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of therest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.

But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon "made ground"; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others.

What is it that strikes a spark of humor from a man? It is the effort to throw off, to fight back the burden of grief that is laid on each one of us. In youth we don't feel it, but as we grow to manhood we find the burden on our shoulders. Humor? It is nature's effort to harmonize conditions. The further the pendulum swings out over woe the further it is bound to swing back over mirth.

Comedy keeps the heart sweet.

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

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 was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher.

Few of us stand prosperity; another man's I mean.

He said that man’s heart was the only bad heart in the animal kingdom; that man was the only animal capable of feeling malice, envy, vindictiveness, revengefulness, hatred, selfishness, the only animal that loves drunkenness, almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness and a filthy habitation, the sole animal in whom was fully developed the base instinct called patriotism, the sole animal that robs, persecutes, oppresses and kills members of his own tribe, the sole animal that steals and enslaves the members of any tribe.

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories— and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures.

The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God's treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them.

You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.

There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

I do not see how astronomers can help feeling exquisitely insignificant, for every new page of the Book of the Heavens they open reveals to them more and more that the world we are so proud of is to the universe of careening globes as is one mosquito to the winged and hoofed flocks and herds that darken the air and populate the plains and forests of all the earth. If you killed the mosquito would it be missed? Verily, What is Man, that he should be considered of God?

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

If I were going to construct a God I would furnish him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present One lacks... He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

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

By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.

There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist. ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak -- like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support -- something that ought to be arrested.

But they (the infantry) had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.

It was a splendid population - for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home - you never find that sort of people among pioneers - you cannot build pioneers out of that sort of material. It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day - and when she projects a new surprise the grave world smiles as usual and says, "Well, that is California all over.

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.

God's noblest work. Man who found it out? Man.

When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.

A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.

Well - Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

A jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to the world because he is a jackass; but anobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.

Some people bring joy wherever they go, and some people bring joy whenever they go.