Mark Twain Quotes

Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes-circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.

Hunger is the handmaid of genius

Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows

It is plain that there is one moral law for heaven and another for the earth. The pulpit assures us that wherever we see suffering and sorrow, which we can relieve and do not, we sin, heavily. There was never yet a case of suffering or sorrow which God could not relieve. Does He sin then?

When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it.

I was an arden Hayes man, but that was natural, for I was pretty young at the time, I have since convinced myself that the political opinioins of a nation are of next to no value, in any case, but that what little rag of value they posess is to be found among the old, rather than among the young.

It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.

If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loudly. Do not compound mispronunciation with inaudibility

An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.

The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way.

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.

Perfect grammar - persistent, continuous, sustained - is the fourth dimension, so to speak; many have sought it, but none has found it.

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

School gets in the way of my learning.

I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.

It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.

Switzerland would me a mighty big place if it were ironed flat.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?

Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.

A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.

And I urge upon you this - which I think is wisdom - if you find you can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go.

Progressive improvement beats delayed perfection.

It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

There is no accounting for human beings.

Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.

These are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

The reason most people don't go to church is because they've already been.

You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year.

God has put something noble and good into every heart His hand created.

My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.

There's nobody for me to attack in this matter even with soft and gentle ridicule-and I shouldn't ever think of using a grown up weapon in this kind of a nursery. Above all, I couldn't venture to attack the clergymen whom you mention, for I have their habits and live in the same glass house which they are occupying. I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

It is better to support schools than jails.

Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down-- he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.

Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.