Mark Twain Quotes (1103 Quotes)


    I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

    On Hawaii The loveliest fleet of islands that lies anchored in any ocean

    Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

    I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.

    Not until you become a stranger to yourself will you be able to make acquaintance with the Friend.


    When one has tasted it Watermelon he knows what the angels eat.

    It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.

    His money is twice tainted 'taint yours and 'taint mine

    Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.

    It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

    A hypocritical Boston tycoon once told Mark Twain, 'Before I die I mean to make a pilgrimage to the top of Mount Sinai in the Holy Land and read the Ten Commandments aloud.' 'Why don't you stay right home in Boston,' suggested Twain, 'and keep them.

    Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.

    In the weltering hell of the Moorooroo plain The Yatala Wangary withers and dies, And the Worrow Wanilla, demented with pain, To the Woolgoolga woodlands Despairingly flies.

    In a museum in Havana there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus -- 'one when he was a boy and one when he was a man.'

    The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

    As to the Adjective when in doubt, strike it out.

    Honest poverty is a gem that even a king might be proud to call his own, but I wish to sell out.

    We write frankly and freely but then we modify'' before we print.

    If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries the ice-storm when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top ice that is as br.

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

    Maybe it's not as bad as it sounds.

    Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.


    He is useless on top of the ground he ought to be be under it, inspiring the cabbages.

    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 . . .

    Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

    An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere

    You ought never to sass old people- unless they sass you first


    There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it

    He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.

    There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press

    There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

    No man is straitly honest to any but himself and God

    As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and. . . Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.

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

    Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

    The people stared at us everywhere, and we stared at them. We bore down on them with America's greatness until we crushed them.

    A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.

    He had only one vanity he thought he could give advice better than any other person.

    God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

    Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

    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.

    Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

    By the etiquette of war, it is permitted to none below the rank of newspaper correspondent to dictate to the general in the field

    I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble, if there were only one in the world.

    The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.

    The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession.

    God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage

    It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.


    Related Authors


    Virginia Woolf - Og Mandino - Neale Donald Walsch - Mark Twain - Henry David Thoreau - Hans Christian Andersen - Robert Kiyosaki - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelle - Jane Roberts - James Allen


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