Mark Twain Quotes

Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.

While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

Simple rules for saving money: To save half, when you are fired by an eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait and count to forty. To save three quarters, count sixty. To save all, count sixty-five.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.

You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.

It's easy to endure adversity -- if it happens to someone else.

Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.

There is this trouble about special providences namely, there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to be the beneficiary. In the case of the children, the bears, and the prophet, the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, because they got the children.

Never learn to do anything: if you don't learn, you'll always find someone else to do it for you.

Everything human is pathetic

This is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature, and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.

We Americans are the most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.

It is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and not kick.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

I have seen an entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon of a broken leg. I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in their eyes, to bless this beneficient institution. In all my experiences of life, I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a freshly mutilated man's face when he feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right.

The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.'

The most successful people are those who do all year long what they would otherwise do on their summer vacation.

Adam was the luckiest man in the world. He had no mother-in-law.

Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments - notably those of the violin - but it seems to set a piano's teeth on edge.

Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that did not exist before.

If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me Napoleonic in its grandeur.

Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother's path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard.

A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance.

Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it.

Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.

When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.

Don't let schooling interfere with your education.

The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.

Geniuses are people who dash off weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates a man to ineffable speres [sic] far above the vulgar world, & fills his soul with a regal contempt for the gross & sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.

God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat.

The old saw says, 'Let a sleeping dog lie.' Right. Still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.

There is no such thing as material covetousness. All covetousness is spiritual. ...Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.

It is curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing, nickel-plated word has for you.

These people´s God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible´s statues. He breaks every one of them himself, adultery and all.

There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle afer cycle, by force and bloodshed.

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.

Take your mind out every now and then and dance on it. It is getting all caked up.