Mark Twain Quotes

A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.

It's so damned humiliating.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life-hence it is a valuable possession to him.

I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

Nations do not think, they only feel. They get their feelings at second hand through their temperaments, not their brains. A nation can be brought -- by force of circumstances, not argument -- to reconcile itself to any kind of government or religion that can be devised; in time it will fit itself to the required conditions; later it will prefer them and will fiercely fight for them.

In literature imitations do not imitate.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

... the English alphabet is pure insanity..., It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty.

I like criticism, but it must be my way.

I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.

Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. The cup is small, it is smeared with grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in taste. The bottom of the cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch deep. This goes down your throat, and portions of it lodge by the way, and produce a tickling aggravation that keeps you barking and coughing for an hour.

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

Slang in a woman's mouth is not obscene, it only sounds so.

Unused talents gives you no advantage over someone who has no talent at all.

The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky, because everything there happens 20 years after it happens anywhere else.

The funniest things are the forbidden.

...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.

Definite speech means clarity of mind.

Children have but little charity for one another's defects

One must travel, to learn.

Thanksgiving Day - Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.

I think a compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.

I used to think my father was an idiot, until I turned twenty-one... Then I thought he was a genus.

The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.

Dying man couldn't make up his mind which place to go to-both have their advantages, heaven for the climate, hell for the company!

The law of work does seem utterly unfair-but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, too.

I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.

An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.

There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad.

Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time.

The church is always trying to get other people to reform, it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example

Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.

I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children.

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else.

The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.

If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Word it as softly as you please, the spirit of patriotism is the spirit of the dog and wolf. The moment there is a misunderstanding about a boundary line or a hamper of fish or some other squalid matter, see patriotism rise, and hear him split the universe with is war-whoop. The spirit of patriotism being in its nature jealous and selfish, is just in man's line, it comes natural to him - he can live up to all its requirements to the letter; but the spirit of Christianity is not in its entirety possible to him.

You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it.

Now I can only pray that there may be a God -- and a heaven -- or something better.

It is not a new thing for a thoroughly good and well-meaning preacher´s soft heart to run away with his soft head.