Mark Twain Quotes

Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

The difference between fiction and nonfiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

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

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.

He was such a good man that people hated to see him coming.

I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.

The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

Independence-is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

Never miss an opportunity to shut up.

The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it

I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up...These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with.

A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it.

Imagination labors best in distant fields.

My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something)

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.

The machine has several virtues... One may lean back in his chair and work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around.

Every man is in his own person the whole human race without a detail lacking....I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born.

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

The introduction of homeopathy forced the old school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business. You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths to destroy it.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.

We have to keep our God placated with prayer, and even then we are never sure of him-how much higher and finer is the Indian's God...Our illogical God is all-powerful in name, but impotent in fact; the Great Spirit is not all-powerful, but does the very best he can for his injun and does it free of charge

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

I have been scientifically 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 profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million.

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.

For we were little Christian children and early learned the value of forbidden fruit.

The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.

First catch your Boer, then kick him.

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.

When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.

I do not wish any reward but to know I have done the right thing.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night.

Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one.

Thanksgiving day. Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks now, but the turkeys.

I do love compliments, yet I'm often embarrassed to say what I think to the person when I get a compliment. I so often feel that they have not gone far enough.