Mark Twain Quotes

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Time spent with your children is time wisely spent.

Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.

Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man with his mouth.

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

In our day we don't allow a hundred and thirty years to elapse between glimpses of a marvel. If somebody should discover a creek in the county next to the one that the North Pole is in, Europe and America would start fifteen costly expeditions thither; one to explore the creek, and the other fourteen to hunt for each other.

Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.

The heart is the real fountain of youth.

Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. I do not know what a palladium is, but I am sure it is a good thing!

When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.

By "trampling upon the helpless abroad" with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, "by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home."

The devil's aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despots dread of a newspaper that laughs.

Buy land, they're not making it anymore.

Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.

Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight -- this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one -- this is business.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.

It is a good thing to write for the amusement of the public, but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction, their profit, their actual and tangible benefit.

How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English―it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them―then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

It is a shameful thing to insult a child.

When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Love your enemy, it will scare the hell out of them.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a beautiful woman is after considerable acquaintance with her.

I thoroughly believe that any man who's got anything worthwhile to say will be heard if he only says it often enough.

New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.

Yes - en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'.

Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW is only a small step and quickly taken.

I was born with Halley's Comet and I expect to die upon its return

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others-his last breath.

Good exercise for the heart: reach out and help your neighbor

I could be an idiot, or I can serve in Congress, but I repeat myself.

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.

Ethical man: A Christian holding four aces.

The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world'd luxuries, king by grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.

Had double chins all the way down to his stomach.

Man is a marvelous curiosity...he thinks he is the Creator's pet...he even believes the Creator loves him; has passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks he listens. Isn't it a quaint idea.

Man is the only slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another. In our day, he is always some man's slave for wages, and does that man's work; and this slave has other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work. The higher animals are the only ones who exclusively do their own work and provide their own living.

Never be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty.

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?

The truth is a precious commodity. That's why I use it so sparingly.

I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.