Mark Twain Quotes

We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.

...majority Patriotism is the customary Patriotism.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

To write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.

Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.

There isn't anything you can't stand if you are only born and bred to it.

The business aspects of the Fourth of July is not perfect as it stands. See what it costs us every year with loss of life, the crippling of thousands with its fireworks, and the burning down of property. It is not only sacred to patriotism and universal freedom, but to the surgeon, the undertaker, the insurance offices - and they are working it for all it is worth.

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

Let us save the tomorrows for work.

A man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first.

Being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be. It's just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time.

Those who do not read the news are uninformed. Those who do are misinformed.

December is the toughest month of the year. Others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, October, August, and February.

More than one cigar at a time is excessive smoking.

All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.

I hope all of us may eventually be together in everlasting peace and bliss -- except the inventor of the #‎ telephone .

When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years.

[Patriotism] ...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of a longline of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots" with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers" who came to steal it and did -- and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

It is an important thing, in our never-ending pursuit of happiness, to stop and just be happy for a while.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.

So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment.

Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest?

All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The reflection that they-like Columbus-didn't discover what they expected to discover, and didn't discover what they started out to discover, doesn't trouble them. All they remember is that they discovered America; they forget that they started out to discover some patch or corner of India.

In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm.

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.

Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

I do not know what we should do without the pulpit. We could better spare the sun-the moon, anyway.

The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

There is nothing so annoying as to have two people talking when you're busy interrupting.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail.

The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but the fly comes close.

History never repeats itself; at best it sometimes rhymes.

The community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.

At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.

If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is. Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he waited a thousand years before doing it. They forget to say that he is the slowest mover in the universe, that his Eye That Never Sleeps, might as well, since it takes a century to see what any other eye can see in a week.

Crowds stand around all day long and criticise that bridge, and find fault with it, and tell with unlimited frankness how it ought to have been planned, and how they would have built it had the city granted them the $14,000 it cost. It is really refreshing to hang around these and listen to them. A foreigner would come to the conclusion that all America was composed of inspired professional bridge builders.

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. There is nothing more satisfying than that sense of being completely "at home" in your own skin. When you achieve that as a natural state of "being", then you can finally look beyond yourself and fully contribute all your talents to the world.

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane.