Top 100 Quotes About Humor Mark Twain
#1. The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.
Mark Twain
#2. Mark Twain said, "Humor is mankind's greatest blessing." Dorsey Bing said, "I'll take womankind's greatest blessing: more wine.
CeCe Osgood
#3. An honest politician is an oxymoron.
Mark Twain
#4. I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.
Mark Twain
#5. Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
Mark Twain
#6. Congress - that great, benevolent asylum for the helpless
Mark Twain
#7. Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.
Mark Twain
#8. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
Mark Twain
#9. Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice!
Mark Twain
#10. I can last two months on a good compliment.
Mark Twain
#11. Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
Mark Twain
#12. Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
Mark Twain
#13. I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.
Mark Twain
#14. Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene
Mark Twain
#15. The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.
Mark Twain
#16. What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
Mark Twain
#17. April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.
Mark Twain
#18. Wit and Humor - if any difference, it is in duration - lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage - the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.
Mark Twain
#19. I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.
Mark Twain
#20. Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes.
Mark Twain
#21. English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.
Mark Twain
#22. He had had much experience of physicians, and said '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 druther not'.
Mark Twain
#23. Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
Mark Twain
#24. But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
Mark Twain
#25. I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
Mark Twain
#26. Death and taxes are the only two certainties in life, as Mark Twain once said. Or was it Benjamin Franklin?
Stephen Leather
#27. To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life;
Mark Twain
#28. If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves.
Mark Twain
#29. A man once said, 'All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.' Mark Twain, you know. He had a fine mustache. Men of wisdom so often do.
Laini Taylor
#30. He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.
Mark Twain
#31. There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.
Mark Twain
#32. We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
Mark Twain
#33. The funniest things are the forbidden.
Mark Twain
#34. Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
Mark Twain
#35. [An example of misattribution:]
If you don't know the source of a quote,
you can always make it sound better by attributing it to me.
- Mark Twain
Jakub Marian
#36. The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
Mark Twain
#37. A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
Mark Twain
#38. The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.
Mark Twain
#39. Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
#40. Having faith is believing in something you just know ain't true.
Mark Twain
#41. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Mark Twain
#42. No! You mean you're the late CHarlemagne; you must be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least."
"Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude.
Mark Twain
#43. A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.
Mark Twain
#44. Tolstoy carelessly neglects to include a boat race.
Mark Twain
#45. A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.
Mark Twain
#46. Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.
Mark Twain
#47. When a man's dog turns against hime, it is time for his wife to pack her trunk and go home to mamma.
Mark Twain
#48. It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
Mark Twain
#49. Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.
Mark Twain
#50. In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man
Mark Twain
#51. His hair was short and parted accurately in the middle, and he had all the look of an American person who would be likely to begin his signature with an initial, and spell his middle name out.
Mark Twain
#52. Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.
Mark Twain
#53. This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth
ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
- Letter to J. H. Twichell, 1/29/1901
Mark Twain
#54. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Mark Twain
#55. Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do.
Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Mark Twain
#56. 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
#57. He is in heaven now, and happy; or if not there, he bides in hell and is content; for in that place he will find neither abbot nor yet bishop.
Mark Twain
#58. Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point.
Mark Twain
#59. Adam was but human - this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
Mark Twain
#60. Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
Mark Twain
#61. If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.
Mark Twain
#62. There are two kinds of speakers. Those who are nervous and those who are liars.
Mark Twain
#63. Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.
Mark Twain
#64. We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision true
humor.
Mark Twain
#65. Today the same thing over. I've got it up the tree again.
Mark Twain
#66. At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on there clothes to keep them from being stolen.
Mark Twain
#67. The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.
Mark Twain
#68. A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Mark Twain
#70. Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more restful.
Mark Twain
#71. The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.
Mark Twain
#72. I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.
Mark Twain
#73. I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religous. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performace of the pieties enjoined b ythe Church
Mark Twain
#74. Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn.
Mark Twain
#75. If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.
Mark Twain
#76. LEARN FROM THE MASTERS:
Mark Twain once said, "Show, don't tell." This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like "Show, don't tell." Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.
Colin Nissan
#77. The Jabalites ... They worship no god; and if we in goodness of heart do send a missionary to show them the way of life, they listen with respect to all he hath to say, and then they eat him. This doth tend to hinder the spread of light.
Mark Twain
#78. Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
[Mark Twain, a Biography]
Mark Twain
#79. I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
Mark Twain
#80. What would men be without women? Scarce, sir ... mighty scarce.
Mark Twain
#81. In another moment he was flying down the street with his pail and a tingling rear, Tom was whitewashing with vigor, and Aunt Polly was retiring from the field with a slipper in her hand and triumph in her eye.
Mark Twain
#82. A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
Mark Twain
#83. I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Mark Twain
#84. I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
Mark Twain
#85. I do not like work even when someone else is doing it.
Mark Twain
#86. I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.
Mark Twain
#87. I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.
Mark Twain
#88. New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
Mark Twain
#89. He had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would a thought he was Adam, he was just all mud.
Mark Twain
#90. 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
#92. The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.
Mark Twain
#93. A sense of humor is the one thing no one will admit to not having.
Mark Twain
#94. The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.
Mark Twain
#95. I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.
Mark Twain
#96. The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.
Mark Twain
#97. Being made merely in the image of God but not otherwise resembling him enough to be mistaken by anybody but a very near sighted person.
Mark Twain
#99. Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.
Mark Twain
#100. I realize how much [Mark] Twain fabricated things. I like it very much, but it's only half true. And it shows what he was trying to do, which was just entertain. Which he does very successfully, though the humor is almost dated now.
John Gimlette
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
