Mark Twain Quotes

S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy - what would you think?

To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self, (in private,) during life, but only alters the style of heroism from time to time as the drifting years belittle certain gods of his admiration and raise up others in their stead.

Like most people, I often feel mean, and act accordingly.

A Christian's first duty is to God. It then follows, as a matter of course, that it is his duty to carry his Christian code to the polls and vote them... If Christians should vote their duty to God at the polls, they would carry every election, and do it with ease... it would bring about a moral revolution that would be incalculably beneficent. It would save the country.

I would much prefer to suffer from the clean incision of an honest lancet than from a sweetened poison.

The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.

I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

That is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy with his achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all-that all his accumulation proves an entirely different thing.

Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling;the comic and the witty story upon the matter.

There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.

The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.

The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind at heart and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.

I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's decision any way.

The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it.

Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them.

The law of work seems unfair, but nothing can change it; the more enjoyment you get out of your work, the more money you will make.

Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type.

Eight grown Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone-if still alive.

Don't dream your life, but live your dream

A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

Tight pants are just uncomfortable.

If they [the dead] should speak, it would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realise, deep down, that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they seem to be-and never can be.

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style.

The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

An open mind leaves a chance for someone to drop a worthwhile thought in it.

I have witnessed and greatly enjoyed the first act of everything which Wagner created, but the effect on me has always been so powerful that one act was quite sufficient; whenever I have witnessed two acts I have gone away physically exhausted; and whenever I have ventured an entire opera the result has been the next thing to suicide.

Denial is much more then an Egyptian River.

Education is what remains when what is learned has been taken away.

One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one. From the code of morals I have been following and revising and revising for 72 years I remember one detail. All my life I have been honest - comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly - I could only lend it.

I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.

Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them all, and do it without shame. Because honor to party is above honor to themselves.

We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.

It’s not the good that die young, it’s the lucky.

All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure.

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.