Mark Twain Quotes on Books (20 Quotes)


    Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

    If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them - you can't help it and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so

    Four years at West Point and plenty of books and schooling will learn a man a great deal, It won't learn him the river.

    A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thin 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 cl.

    Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.


    Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new

    I have had an aversion to good spelling for sixty years and more, merely for the reason that when I was a boy there was not a thing I could do creditably except spell according to the book. It was a poor and mean distinction, and I early learned to disenjoy it. I suppose that this is because the ability to spell correctly is a talent, not an acquirement. There is some dignity about an acquirement, because it is a product of your own labor. It is wages earned, whereas to be able to do a thing merely by the grace of God, and not by your own effort, transfers the distinction to our heavenly home where possibly it is a matter of pride and satisfaction, but it leaves you naked and bankrupt.

    A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.

    My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

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

    Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

    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.

    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

    Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

    Heroine girl who is perfectly charming to live with, in a book.

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

    There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself.

    Suppose ... burglars had made entry into this ... library. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress.

    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.

    'Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.


    More Mark Twain Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - World - Life - Time - People - Truth - God - Education - Mind - Books - Money & Wealth - Death & Dying - Heaven - Law & Regulation - Wisdom & Knowledge - Cats - Youth - Countries - Friendship - View All Mark Twain Quotations

    More Mark Twain Quotations (By Book Titles)


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