Mark Twain Quotes

There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing

We must put up with our clothes as they are - they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us - to advertise what we wear them to conceal. They are a sign; a sign of insincerity; a sign of suppressed vanity; a pretense that we desire gorgeous colors and the graces of harmony and form; and we put them on to propagate that lie and back it up.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top.

You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not for the world.

No one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms-fortunately harmless forms as a rule.

You can't no more teach what you ain't learned than you can come from where you ain't been.

One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a really beautiful woman is after considerable acquaintance with her; and the rule applies to Niagara Falls, to majestic mountains, and to mosques-especially to mosques.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

You need not expect to get your book right the first time.

It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.

If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.

The world doesn't owe you anything. It was here first.

It didn't take me long to make up my mind that these liars warn't no kings nor dukes at all, but just low-down humbugs and frauds. But I never said nothing, never let on; kept it to myself; it's the best way; then you don't have no quarrels, and don't get into no trouble. If they wanted us to call them kings and dukes, I hadn't no objections, 'long as it would keep peace in the family; and it warn't no use to tell Jim, so I didn't tell him. If I never learnt nothing else out of pap, I learnt that the best way to get along with his kind of people is to let them have their own way.

Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene

One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.

God rewards gamblers and fools. The crucial thing, when you win, is knowing which you were.

The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

A few fly bites cannot stop a spirited horse.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

There are no wild animals until man makes them so.

I simply can´t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.

When we do not know a person - and also when we do - we have to judge his size by the size and nature of his achievements, as compared with the achievements of others in his special line of business - there is no other way.

We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.

I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.

It's good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.

When you catch an adjective, kill it - perhaps the best possible advice for budding writers.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.

Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.

You can't throw too much style into a miracle.

Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.

Every man has a secret ambition: To outsmart horses, fish and women.

The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it.

The law is a system that protects everybody who can afford to hire a good lawyer.

My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian-an early Indian. Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine. Your people made it tropical for them. . . . The first slave brought into New England out of Africa was an ancestor of mine-for I am a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly ofthe storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.