Mark Twain Quotes (1103 Quotes)

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

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on th.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

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

The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he

It was a soft, reposeful summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as Sunday.

He gossips habitually he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue

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

All saints can do miracles, but few of them can keep a hotel

There aint no way to find out why a snorer cant hear himself more.

Not all horses were born equal. A few were born to win.

I don't give a damn for man that can spell a word only one way.

Probably there is nothing in the world so suggestive of serene contentment and perfect bliss as the spectacle of a calf chewing a dishrag, but the nearest approach to it is your reedy tenor, standing apart, in sickly attitude, with head thrown back a.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.

An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.

If you beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time

I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

Cast iron rules will not answer what is one man's colon is another man's comma.

The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."

Yes, you are right - I am a moralist in disguise it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

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

The Pause that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, however so felicitous, could accomplish it.

I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.

That's what an army is -- a mob they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

A great soul, with a great purpose, can make a weak body strong and keep it so

Most people are bothered by scripture they don't understand, but what bothers me are those I do understand.

Ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smo

Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.

Drag your thoughts away from your troubles... by the ears, by the heels, or any other way you can manage it.

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three I attended their funerals.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Always do right - this will gratify some and astonish the rest.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.

A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.

Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight - this is magnanimity but bet on the other one - this is business

When the human race has once acquired a superstition nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

By hard, honest labor I've dug all the large words out of my vocabulary and shaved it down till the average is three and a half. . . . I never write metropolis for seven cents, because I can get the same money for city.

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.

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.

The average man don't like trouble and danger.

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force.

The world will not stop and think- it never does, it is not its way its way is to generalize from a single sample

This old stone tower was very massive--and rather ruinous, too, for it was Roman, and four hundred years old. Yes, and handsome, after a rude fashion, and clothed with ivy from base to summit, as with a shirt of scale mail.