Mark Twain Quotes

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

Your friends may love you in private but your enemies will hate you in public.

The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

It is noble to teach oneself; it is still nobler to teach others.

There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule.

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.

The water is clearer than the air, and the air is the air that angels breathe.

Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made.

Our inner strengths, experiences, and truths cannot be lost, destroyed, or taken away. Every person has an inborn worth and can contribute to the human community. We all can treat one another with dignity and respect, provide opportunities to grow toward our fullest lives and help one another discover and develop our unique gifts. We each deserve this and we all can extend it to others.

Always tell the truth. That way you don't have to remember what you said.

I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time is come I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.

When in doubt, tell the truth. That maxim I did invent, but never expected it to be applied to me. I did say, "When you are in doubt," but when I am in doubt myself I use more sagacity.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals?

Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood.

We all like to see people sea-sick when we are not ourselves.

There has been only one Christian. They caught and curcified him-early.

I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it.

Fame is a vapor, popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.

A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.

It is not what a man knows, but what he thinks of in time.

We can't always have the beautiful aspect of things. Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful and let the others go

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.

Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession-and take the credit of the correction.

We can achieve what we can conceive and believe.

An average English word is four letters and a half. By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half... I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city. I never write policeman, because I can get the same price for cop.... I never write valetudinarian at all, for not even hunger and wretchedness can humble me to the point where I will do a word like that for seven cents; I wouldn't do it for fifteen.

On with the dance, let the joy be unconfined.

Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.

Men and women -- even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.

Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is - heartbreaking bereavement.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.

As by the fires of experience, so by commission of crime you learn real morals. Commit all crimes, familiarize yourself with all sins, take them in rotation (there are only two or three thousand of them), stick to it, commit two or three every day, and by and by you will be proof against them. When you are through you will be proof against all sins and morally perfect. You will be vaccinated against every possible commission of them. This is the only way.

I am technically "boss" of the family which I am carrying along-but I am grateful to know that it is only technically - that the real authority rests on the other side of the house. It is placed there by a beneficent Providence, who foresaw before I was born, or, if he did not, he has found it out since - that I am not in any way qualified to travel alone.

The old saw says - 'Let a sleeping dog lie.' Experience knows better; experience says, If you want to convince do it yourself.

As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it-it is like hitting a child.

When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.

Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot; and there ain't any real difference between triplets and a insurrection. - The Babies speech 1879

Two days overdue, THE WORLD'S WORK has not reached me. Pray make a note of this. I would rather not have to resort to violence.

There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. . . . The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. . . . When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.

I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired.

Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more restful.

If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, "As unhappy as God."