Top 100 Mark Twain Quotes
#1. Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.
Mark Twain
#2. You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.
Mark Twain
#3. I don't want no better book than what your face is.
Mark Twain
#5. Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak
like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support
something that ought to be arrested.
Mark Twain
#6. Gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica.
Mark Twain
#7. It's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know for sure that ain't true.
Mark Twain
#8. Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress and some would lose all of it.
Mark Twain
#9. Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Mark Twain
#10. To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.
Mark Twain
#11. It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.
Mark Twain
#12. Every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution.
Mark Twain
#13. How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!
Mark Twain
#14. Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.
Mark Twain
#15. The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.
Mark Twain
#16. A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.
Mark Twain
#17. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
#20. Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the state die? Oh, no.
Mark Twain
#21. Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.
Mark Twain
#22. These Sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them;
Mark Twain
#23. Everybody lies ... every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.
Mark Twain
#24. you are going to find out the facts of a thing, what's the sense in guessing out what ain't the facts and wasting ammunition?
Mark Twain
#25. I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released today.'
It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.
Mark Twain
#26. Is a person's public and private opinion the same? It is thought there have been instances.
Mark Twain
#27. God rewards gamblers and fools. The crucial thing, when you win, is knowing which you were.
Mark Twain
#28. Kindness is a language herd by deaf men and felt by blind men.
Mark Twain
#29. The law of work seems unfair, but nothing can change it; the more enjoyment you get out of your work, the more money you will make.
Mark Twain
#30. A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
Mark Twain
#31. Better a broken promise than none at all.
Mark Twain
#32. To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye-what ye say of me is now of no consequence.
Mark Twain
#33. War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
Mark Twain
#34. What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one's self-approval.
Mark Twain
#35. In literature imitations do not imitate.
Mark Twain
#36. None but the dead have free speech.
Mark Twain
#37. 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.
Mark Twain
#38. The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality.
Mark Twain
#39. You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it.
Mark Twain
#40. I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.
Mark Twain
#42. Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned
Mark Twain
#43. We were surprised how closely the cuckoo imitated the clock-and yet, of course, it could never have heard a clock.
Mark Twain
#44. Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness ... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.
Mark Twain
#45. I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman.
Mark Twain
#46. Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.
Mark Twain
#47. Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
Mark Twain
#48. The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say.
Mark Twain
#49. He gossips habitually; he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue.
Mark Twain
#50. People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.
Mark Twain
#51. I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.
Mark Twain
#52. Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.
Mark Twain
#53. God cures and the doctor sends the bill.
Mark Twain
#54. We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks- if we agree with him.
Mark Twain
#55. I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion.
Mark Twain
#56. One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.
Mark Twain
#57. I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.
Mark Twain
#58. Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement.
Mark Twain
#59. An occultation of Venus is not half so difficult as an eclipse of the sun, but because it comes seldom the world thinks it's a grand thing.
Mark Twain
#60. Let us change the tense for convenience.
Mark Twain
#61. Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.
Mark Twain
#62. One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one.
Mark Twain
#63. Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
Mark Twain
#64. Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more.
Mark Twain
#65. Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.
Mark Twain
#66. Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
Mark Twain
#67. More men go to church than want to.
Mark Twain
#68. A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom when he can no longer be led by the nose.
Mark Twain
#69. You can't pray a lie -- I found that out.
Mark Twain
#70. There is nothing so annoying as having two people talking when you're busy interrupting.
Mark Twain
#71. The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.
Mark Twain
#72. Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.
Mark Twain
#73. In all ages of the world this eminently plausible fiction has lured the obtuse infant to financial ruin and disaster.
Mark Twain
#74. Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And today, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy and fall down and worship it!
Mark Twain
#75. As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords.
Mark Twain
#76. I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.
Mark Twain
#77. It's considered good sportsmanship not to pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.
Mark Twain
#78. A little lie can travel half way 'round the world while Truth is still lacing up her boots.
Mark Twain
#79. In truth I care little about any party's politics-the man behind it is the important thing.
Mark Twain
#80. I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world.
Mark Twain
#81. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people.
Mark Twain
#82. I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't know why.
Mark Twain
#83. Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.
Mark Twain
#84. Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand
Mark Twain
#85. While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.
Mark Twain
#86. Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink - under any circumstances.
Mark Twain
#88. When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.
Mark Twain
#89. Do good when you can, and charge when you think they will stand it.
Mark Twain
#90. All people have had ill luck, but Jairus's daughter and Lazarus had the worst.
Mark Twain
#91. The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
Mark Twain
#92. She makes me wash, they make me comb all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed ... the widder [widow] eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she wakes up by a bell-everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it
Mark Twain
#93. The best of all lost arts is honesty
Mark Twain
#94. A proof once established is better left so.
Mark Twain
#95. The rain ... falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain's affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors, I would drown him.
Mark Twain
#96. The citizen who sees his society's democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.
Mark Twain
#97. Just because you're taught that something's right and everyone believes it's right, it don't make it right.
Mark Twain
#98. Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.
Mark Twain
#99. Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane ...
Mark Twain
#100. I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
Mark Twain
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