Mark Twain Quotes

The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent.

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.

Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young - I mean, for a whole day at a time.

Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it.

Make your vacation your vocation.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That, of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still, while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable.

Indeed, none but the Deity can tell what is good luck and what is bad before the returns are all in.

Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.

Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned

A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place.

The humorist who invented trial by jury played a colossal practical joke upon the world, but since we have the system we ought to try and respect it. A thing which is not thoroughly easy to do, when we reflect that by command of the law a criminal juror must be an intellectual vacuum, attached to a melting heart and perfectly macaronian bowels of compassion.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.

English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.

I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry.

The best of us would rather be popular than right.

Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome; in San Francisco in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather.

Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.

O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.

The equator was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried to grab it.

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man.

How unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious.

Not all the Greek runners in the original Olympics were totally naked. Some wore shoes.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there.

Too much is just enough.

Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.

I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

A religion that comes of thought, and study, and deliberate conviction, sticks best. The revivalized convert who is scared in the direction of heaven because he sees hell yawn suddenly behind him, not only regains confidence when his scare is over, but is ashamed of himself for being scared, and often becomes more hopelessly and malignantly wicked than he was before.

That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.

Every time I reform in one direction I go overboard in another.

This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast.

There has been much tragedy in my life; at least half of it actually happened.

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.

All you drunkards: Put down the intoxicating Vanity Metrics.

I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.

I am pushing sixty. That is enough exercise for me.

The average man don't like trouble and danger.

In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

Gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica.

It must be well-nigh a maximum of sense to behave so that one escapes being hanged.

I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.