Mark Twain Quotes

Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.

The rain ...falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain's affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors, I would drown him.

Nothing is made in vain, but the fly came near it.

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle; ...they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; ...those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. It comes at last--the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them--and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence, ...a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.

I have carried a revolver; lots of us do, but they are the most innocent things in the world.

Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term.

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing and predatory as it is - in our country particularly, and in all other Christian countries in a somewhat modified degree - it is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime- the invention of Hell.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

Do right and you will be conspicuous.

Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.

[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.

A great, great deal has been said about the weather, but very little has ever been done.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and happenings.

No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.

The real yellow peril: Gold.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.

In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.

No one can tell me what is a good cigar - for me. I am the only judge. People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst cigars in the world. They bring their own cigars when they come to my house.

Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.

The only people that a bank will loan money to is the very people who don't need it.

The first time a student realizes that a little learning is a dangerous thing is when he brings home a poor report card.

There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers after the Truth-have you ever heard of a permanent one?

Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.

I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.

A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once-not oftener.

Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.

Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.

... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.

The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. Man gets his through months and months of cruel torture; he will never get a set which can really be depended on 'till a dentist makes him one.

The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless punctilios and pronounce his name right.

I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.

You cannot have a theory without principles. Principles is another name for prejudices.

Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

It was on the 10th day of May - 1884 - that I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on.

The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.

How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand!

All people have had ill luck, but Jairus's daughter and Lazarus had the worst.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

The cost of living hasn't effected its popularity.