Mark Twain Quotes

The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination

The New York papers have long known that no large question is ever really settled until I have been consulted.

[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

Women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women.

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.

The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid.

Does the human being reason? No; he thinks, muses, reflects, but does not reason...that is, in the two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind, politics and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more.

If the metrics you are looking at aren't useful in optimizing your strategy - stop looking at them.

But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.

What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason.

My heart goes out to anyone who is making his first appearance before an audience of human beings.

It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.

The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.

Success is a journey, not a destination. It requires constant effort, vigilance and reevaluation.

I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast-but for luncheon-for dinner- for tea-for supper-for between meals.

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts.

We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books- theoretically at least.

Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange; for tastes are made, not born. I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired; but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head and say, 'Where's your haggis?' and the Fijan would sigh and say, 'Where's your missionary?'

They say that you can't live by bread alone, but I can live on compliments.

Virtue has never been as respectable as money.

None of us can be as great as God, but any of us can be as good.

...one of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of pumpkins in - however, the Territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum".

It has been reported that I was seriously ill--it was another man; dying--it was another man; dead--the other man again...As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported, except that I have become a foreigner. When you hear it, don't you believe it. And don't take the trouble to deny it. Merely just raise the American flag on our house in Hartford and let it talk.

He had an uncommon fondness for cats. As an old man summering in New Hampshire, Twain even rented kittens from a nearby farm to keep him company until he returned home. "If man could be crossed with the cat," said Twain, "it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat." There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.

The southerner talks music.

It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.

what is joy without sorrow? what is success without failure? what is a win without a loss? what is health without illness? you have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. there is always going to be suffering. it’s how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, that will define you.

The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.

Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute-but they all worship money.

Jesus died to save men - a small thing for an immortal to do - and didn't save many, anyway. But if he had been damned for the race, that would have been act of a size proper to a god, and would have saved the whole race.

If one is honest there is no need to remember.

I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again.

Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.

The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.

I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.

To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth.

If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.

I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.

Nevertheless we have this curious spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination, and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself. It does seem as if we ought to be humble when we are at a bench-show, and not put on airs of intellectual superiority there.

Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.