Mark Twain Quotes

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.

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

Truth is such a precious article - let us all economize in its use.

The most permanent lessons in morals are those which come, not of book teaching, but of experience.

Why should anybody want to save the human race, or damn it either? Does God want its society? Does Satan?

Don't tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.

We are all alike, on the inside.

We are all ignorant; just about different things.

The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods. It remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime. It is no more entitled to respect than is the flag of a pirate.

I've never let my school interfere with my education.

Tis Better to Sit there and LOOK the fool, than to open your mouth and prove it.

As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

Life is short, break the rules.

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

....try the mustard, - a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard.

To stand still is to fall behind.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do.

It is wiser to find out than to suppose.

It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory - and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.

The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind.

Names are not always what they seem.

I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.

Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But, after all, it is an overstatement. If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their trust in The Health Board.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!

There is only one good sex. The female one.

I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. I had my twenty-dollar gold piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it.... I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses, when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use in wasting it on them.

But it warn't no time to be sentimentering.

Bridgeport?" Said I. "Camelot," Said he.

Too bad that youth is wasted on the young.

He charged nothing for his preaching and it was worth it too.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.

Braveness is resistance to concern, mastery of panic - not absense of anxiety.

...the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

Oh Death where is thy sting! It has none. But life has.

We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.

If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.

What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms?