The Twain Quotes

#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. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

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

Mark Twain

#14. 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

#15. 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

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

Mark Twain

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

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

Mark Twain

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Mark Twain

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. My parents were big music fans, and my dad plays music, so I grew up with Madonna, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Alice In Chains ... it was all over the place. I had a Third Eye Blind record, but I also had Korn, Courtney Love, and Shania Twain.

Madi Diaz

#30. 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

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

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

#33. 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

#34. Let convulsions shake the solid earth, let the skies themselves be rent in twain, yet amid the wreck of worlds the believer shall be as secure as in the calmest hour of rest.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

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

Mark Twain

#36. Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Mark Twain

#37. 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

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

Mark Twain

#39. 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

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

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

#43. 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

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

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

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

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

#61. The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.

Mark Twain

#62. Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself.

Mark Twain

#63. 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

#64. It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

Mark Twain

#65. I wonder if God created man because He was disappointed with the monkey.

Mark Twain

#66. Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.

Mark Twain

#67. Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.

Mark Twain

#68. Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

Mark Twain

#69. Mark Twain was an artist working at the highest level. He wrote a book, his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that put America on the world stage for literature. It's almost as if, if you start reading that book as a racist, you cannot finish it and still be a racist.

Val Kilmer

#70. Today the same thing over. I've got it up the tree again.

Mark Twain

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

Mark Twain

#72. To make fun of an administration, to make fun of anything, Mark Twain said, is the last defense of democracy.

Robin Williams

#73. Mark Twain on George Ade's writing: I have been reading him [Ade] again, and my admiration overflows all limits. How effortless the limning! It is as if the work did itself, without help of the master's hand.

George Ade

#74. I find that the very things that I get criticized for, which is usually being different and just doing my own thing and just being original, is the very thing that's making me successful.

Shania Twain

#75. Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.

Mark Twain

#76. 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

#77. The pilot of the Galilean lake; Two massy keys he bore, of metals twain (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain).

John Milton

#78. Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?

Mark Twain

#79. A jury of inquest was impaneled, and after due deliberation and inquiry they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been so familiar to our ears all the days of our lives - "NOBODY TO BLAME.

Mark Twain

#80. The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey!

Mark Twain

#81. Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped.
-from the Prefatory

Mark Twain

#82. Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.

Mark Twain

#83. Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life.

Mark Twain

#84. In all my travels the thing that has impressed me the most is the universal brotherhood of man-what there is of it.

Mark Twain

#85. For we were little Christian children and early learned the value of forbidden fruit.

Mark Twain

#86. Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.

Mark Twain

#87. No temperance society which is well officered and which has the real good of our fellow-men in view, will ever get drunk save in the seclusion of its temperance hall.

Mark Twain

#88. I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert
a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

Mark Twain

#89. Always obey your parents. When they are present. This is the best policy in the long run. Because if you don't, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.

Mark Twain

#90. WE ARE THE CANAANITES. WE ARE THEY THAT HAVE BEEN DRIVEN OUT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN BY THE JEWISH ROBBER, JOSHUA.

Mark Twain

#91. PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD AND RIDERS TO THE SEA, J. M. Synge. 80pp. 0-486-27562-0 THE

Mark Twain

#92. Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.

Mark Twain

#93. If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.

Mark Twain

#94. Ain't nothin' better
We beat the odds together
I'm glad we didn't listen
Look at what we would be missin'
They said "I bet they'll never make it"
But just look at us holdin' on
We're still together still goin' strong

Shania Twain

#95. The true charm of pedestrians does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking.

Mark Twain

#96. In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.

Mark Twain

#97. Man is the only animal who blushes...or needs to.

Mark Twain

#98. I was sent to a school with bosses for teachers- no Twain, only cane; check your dick you harry, no Dickens either, No Tom Sawyers no David Copperfields only Webster, master it for grammar, the Wren with a dash of Martini-Drink deep.

Aporva Kala

#99. In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.

Mark Twain

#100. Life is short, break the rules.

Mark Twain