Mark Twain Quotes (1103 Quotes)

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.

One learns people through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.

There is no use in walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines. One tells them from the vinegar by the label.

In all my travels the thing that has impressed me the most is the universal brotherhood of man what there is of it.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjectures out of such trifling investment of fact.

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

Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kind of people

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries Mere killing would be too light.

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, Blessed is the man who has found his work Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.

I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort em as much as you please.

To be good is noble, but to teach others how to be good is nobler and less trouble.

Whenever you find you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

It is better to give than receive- especially advice.

God puts something good and something lovable in every man His hands create.

I was young and foolish then now I am old and foolisher.

Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to.

It isn't so astonishing the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things that I can remember that aren't so.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates - 1492 and 4th of July and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion

You may have noticed that the less I know about a subject the more confidence I have, and the more new light I throw on it.

Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory then you can borrow money of them.

Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

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

Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.

Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.

If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.

The only people I know who still believe in hell are the ones who had the proper kind of upbringing

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

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

All the modern inconveniences.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

. . . there warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to but a hog is different.

The Public is merely a multiplied "me."

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave

When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it.