Quotes About Mark Twain

#1. There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

Mark Twain

#2. To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the on-looking world consent to it is finer.

Mark Twain

#3. God made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work?

Mark Twain

#4. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today -- all without seeing him. It is a long time to be alone; still, it is better to be alone that unwelcome. I had to have company -- I was made for it, I think -- so I made friends with the animals.

Mark Twain

#5. Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.

Mark Twain

#6. My interest in my work dies a sudden and violent death when the work is done.

Mark Twain

#7. 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

#8. It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.

Mark Twain

#9. The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history.

Mark Twain

#10. If Mark Twain had had Twitter, he would have been amazing at it. But he probably wouldn't have gotten around to writing Huckleberry Finn.

Andy Borowitz

#11. For someone who made such an enormous contribution to American literature, Mark Twain has been the subject of many books but few major biographies.

Michael Patrick Hearn

#12. I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.

Mark Twain

#13. I would do it myself, but my intelligence is out of repair ...

Mark Twain

#14. The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high board-fence, and disappeared over it.

Mark Twain

#15. A sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience.

Mark Twain

#16. The equator was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried to grab it.

Mark Twain

#17. Time spent with your children is time wisely spent.

Mark Twain

#18. The ancients stole all our ideas from us.

Mark Twain

#19. Yet little Tom was not unhappy. He had a hard time of it but did not know it. It was the sort of time that all the Offal Court boys had; therefore he supposed it was the correct and comfortable thing.

Mark Twain

#20. I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.

Mark Twain

#21. Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.

Mark Twain

#22. 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

#23. I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value
certainly no large value.

Mark Twain

#24. It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

Mark Twain

#25. If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

Mark Twain

#26. The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

Mark Twain

#27. I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Mark Twain

#28. 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

#29. I don't want no better book than what your face is.

Mark Twain

#30. There is nothing like instances to grow hair on a bald-headed argument.

Mark Twain

#31. Low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself.

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

#33. But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason.

Mark Twain

#34. Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change.

Mark Twain

#35. A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

Mark Twain

#36. His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.

Mark Twain

#37. All my life I have been honest-comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly-I could only lend it.

Mark Twain

#38. If I had more time, I would have written less.

Mark Twain

#39. 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

#40. I used to think my father was an idiot, until I turned twenty-one ... Then I thought he was a genus.

Mark Twain

#41. I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.

Mark Twain

#42. He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life.

Mark Twain

#43. The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

Mark Twain

#44. A half-educated physician is not valuable. He thinks he can cure everything.

Mark Twain

#45. Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.

Mark Twain

#46. If God had meant for us to be naked, we'd have been born that way.

Mark Twain

#47. The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.

Mark Twain

#48. The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco

Mark Twain

#49. It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Mark Twain

#50. Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Mark Twain

#51. I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.

Mark Twain

#52. Every year you wait, long ago gets farther away.

Mark Twain

#53. There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.

Mark Twain

#54. A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it.

Mark Twain

#55. Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

Mark Twain

#56. Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.

Mark Twain

#57. The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you.

Mark Twain

#58. One must travel, to learn.

Mark Twain

#59. No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.

Mark Twain

#60. Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.

Mark Twain

#61. Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.

Mark Twain

#62. Never tell a lie-except for practice.

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

#64. Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type.

Mark Twain

#65. Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them all, and do it without shame. Because honor to party is above honor to themselves.

Mark Twain

#66. today i will find strength in my weakness

Mark Twain

#67. There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled.

Mark Twain

#68. If we never lied , there would be nothing to remember.

Mark Twain

#69. I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words.

Mark Twain

#70. There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.

Mark Twain

#71. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Mark Twain

#72. A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditch digging.

Mark Twain

#73. Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.

Mark Twain

#74. Each time in fiction or in history I meet a well-defined personality I am personally interested in him, for we know each other already, because we met on the river.

Mark Twain

#75. When we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.

Mark Twain

#76. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It

Mark Twain

#77. In the first act get your principal character up a tree; in the second act, throw stones at him; in the third, get him down gracefully.

Anonymous

#78. A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.

Mark Twain

#79. We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and it's efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read-

Mark Twain

#80. There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it.

Mark Twain

#81. There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.

Mark Twain

#82. Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that's got sand in it.

Mark Twain

#83. Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good.

Mark Twain

#84. If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be
a Christian. Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist

George Washington

#85. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

Mark Twain

#86. Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

Mark Twain

#87. Mark Twain was so good with crowds that he became, in competition with singers and dancers and actors and acrobats, one of the most popular performers of his time. It is so unusual, and so psychologically unlikely, too, for a great writer to be a great performer, too ...

Kurt Vonnegut

#88. It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.

Mark Twain

#89. Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more restful.

Mark Twain

#90. Citizenship is what makes a republic - monarchies can get along without it.

Mark Twain

#91. We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

Mark Twain

#92. Ah, if he could only die temporarily!

Mark Twain

#93. There is no humor in heaven.

Mark Twain

#94. Virtue never has been as respectable as money.

Mark Twain

#95. I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.

Mark Twain

#96. I prefer milk because I am a Prohibitionist, but I do not go to it for inspiration.

Mark Twain

#97. When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself.

Mark Twain

#98. Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.

Mark Twain

#99. thread, but it's black.

Mark Twain

#100. A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

Mark Twain