Mark Twain Quotes

They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin' ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property.

....honest men are few when it comes to themselves.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.

After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, political, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?

Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

The trouble with most of us is that we know too much that ain't so.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that lies.

What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover?--Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here.

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

Good wine needs no bush; a jug is the thing.

Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse.

In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man

Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

One of life's most over-valued pleasures is sexual intercourse; of one of life's least appreciated pleasures in defecation.

It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh; and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.

Talent without work is useless, thank God

France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.

The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.

In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. . . . There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; . . . she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery.

If I cannot smoke in heaven, then I shall not go.

A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read

...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.

For a male person bric-a-brac hunting is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes.

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once.

Today's burdens can strengthen you for tomorrow.

I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S Grant in full military regalia.

Shut the door not that it lets in the cold but that it lets out the coziness.

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.

The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it.

Always do what's right. That will gratify some and surprise the rest.

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that ain't no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.

Kindness is a language herd by deaf men and felt by blind men.

Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.