Mark Twain Quotes

Mark Twain

Biography

Type: Writter, Lecturer

Born: November 30, 1835

Died: April 21, 1910

The name Mark Twain is a pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri Clemens was an American humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who acquired international fame for his travel narratives, especially The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883), and for his adventure stories of boyhood, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). A gifted raconteur, distinctive humorist, and irascible moralist, he transcended the apparent limitations of his origins to become a popular public figure and one of America’s best and most beloved writers.

Mark Twain Quotes

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.. Mark Twain
I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead..
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.. Mark Twain
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.. Mark Twain
My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.. Mark
Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the
Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of
I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.. Mark Twain
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

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

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. . Mark
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.. Mark Twain
A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.

A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on
April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week,
I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like
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.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.. Mark Twain
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Adam was but human - this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be - a Christian.. Mark
If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be - a Christian.

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

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Obscurity and a competence - that is the life that is best worth living.. Mark Twain
Obscurity and a competence - that is the life that is best worth living.

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.. Mark Twain
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

Write what you know.. Mark Twain
Write what you know.

Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.

Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke..
One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

Work like you don't need the money. Dance like no one is watching. And love like
Work like you don't need the money. Dance like no one is watching. And love like you've never been hurt.

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.

Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in
Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.. Mark Twain
When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

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

[Mark Twain, a Biography]

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.

Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and
shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what you
know ain't so'.

Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

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

I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

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

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

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

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

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

I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.

If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves.

This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth-ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
- Letter to J. H. Twichell, 1/29/1901

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET." - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.

Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove!

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.

Никога не съм позволявал на училището да попречи на образованието ми.

Human nature is all alike.

Yes - en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'.

I'll not go where there is any of that sort of thing going on, again. It's the sure way, and the only sure way;

A proof once established is better left so.

So I learned then, that gold in it's native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

Забелязвам, че колкото по-здраво работя, толкова по-голям късмет имам.

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.

I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.

Yes, King Edward VI lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them worthily.

But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity – another man’s, I mean.

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories - and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures.

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.

The more I the more I know people the more I like my dog

That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

Of course truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

Nature has no originality-I mean, no large ability in the matter of inventing new things, new ideas, new stage effects. She has a superb and amazing and infinitely varied equipment of old ones, but she never adds to them. She repeats-repeats-repeats-repeats. Examine your memory and your experience; you will find it is true.

Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read.

If books are not good company, where shall I find it?

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.

People don't really read your books, they only say they do, to keep you from feeling bad.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons  attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

A woman's intuition is better than a man's. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.

Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.

Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

In light matters-matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things-he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat.

No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

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.

من لا يريد القراءة ليس بأفضل ممن لا يستطيع القراءة

A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a women is, until
after considerable acquaintance with her.

One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare.

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.

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

Nothing exists; all is a dream. God - man - the world - the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars - a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space - and you!

God created war so that Americans would learn geography.

Sing like no one is listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody is watching, and live like it's heaven on earth.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.

Australian History:

.... does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.

Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.

Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry.

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

Yes. And I’m rich now when I think about it. I own myself, and I’m worth eight hundred dollars. I wish I had the money. Then I wouldn’t ever want anything else

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Like it! Yes - the way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I'll stick to 'em, too.

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.

He begged hard, and said he couldn't play - a plausible excuse, but too thin; there wasn't a musician in the country that could.

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

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.

I don't like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell, you see, I have friends in both places.

Children have but little charity for each other's defects.

Children and fools always speak the truth.

The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.

Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true.

It's considered good sportsmanship not to pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.

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

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream-a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought-a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

O homem que não lê não tem nenhuma vantagem sobre o homem que não sabe ler.

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.

Comparison is the death of joy.

Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.

A consciously exaggerated compliment is an offense.

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.

Cuando recordamos que todos somos locos, la vida queda explicada

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

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