Mark Twain Quotes (1103 Quotes)

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.

Don't, like the cat, try to get more out of an experience than there is in it. The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid.

Heaven is by favor if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out.

It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him

Zeal and sincerity can carry a new religion further than any other missionary except fire and sword

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.

It were not best that we should all think alike it is the difference of opinion that makes horse races.

I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

Independence - is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes

Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.

The best way to cheer yourself is to cheer up somebody else.

When I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

There is a good side and a bad side to most people, and in accordance with your own character and disposition you will bring out one of them and the other will remain a sealed book to you

Whem I'm playful I use the meridians and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder.

Happiness ain't a thing in itself -- it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. . . . And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.

There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail.

The rain is famous for falling on the just and unjust alike, but if I had the management of such affairs I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust out doors I would drown him.

It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one

Each person is born to one possession which out values all his others -- his last breath.

My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got.

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

A good and wholesome thing is a little harmless fun in this world it tones a body up and keeps him human and prevents him from souring.

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active . . .

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.

We are all alike, on the inside.

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

All kings is mostly rapscallions.

Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more.

October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.

History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.

A man's private thought can never be a lie what he thinks, is to him the truth, always

There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

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.

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

Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress and some would lose all of it.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself... Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

I've never let my school interfere with my education.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance - and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain

Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence - stuffed and in a museum

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

The church is always trying to get other people to reform it might not be a bad idea to reform itself.

I have been an author for 22 years and an ass for 55

No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.