Top 100 Twain's Quotes
#1. Mark Twain's Roughing It is a book that many people don't know about, but I highly recommend to anybody at any age.
Chuck Jones
#2. I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House.
Bill Hicks
#3. Mark Dawidziak is as comfy and entertaining a tour guide through the world of Mark Twain as Twain himself was a tour guide through the world. In other words, Mark Twain's Guide is such a fun read that the only thing dry about it is the ink.
David Bianculli
#4. History may not repeat itself," in Mark Twain's wise formulation, "but it rhymes.
Adam Smith
#5. When it comes to bending the truth to assist a story's plot versus staying completely true to the facts, we can assure you any dramatist will always select the former. Mark Twain's old saying "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story" still reigns in Hollywood.
James Morcan
#6. You can go into Mark Twain's material and prove anything you want. He was against war. He was for war. He was against rich people and he was for them. He was a kaleidoscope.
Hal Holbrook
#7. I suppose most writers are following Twain's advice to tackle what they know, and my own readings habits drew me to writers who seemed to be writing honestly from their own experiences, whether they presented it in the guise of fiction or not.
Kevin Keck
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#16. It's a good thing for a dog to have fleas; keeps his mind off being a dog.
Mark Twain
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Don't just sit there and worry. Be proactive. Do something - anything - about what's worrying you so you can gain information, focus and control over the situation. I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened.
Mark Twain
#21. What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it ... The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all ... When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.
Mark Twain
#22. God's noblest work. Man who found it out? Man.
Mark Twain
#23. 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
#24. It's very hard to concentrate when your stomach's rumbling.
Shania Twain
#25. Well, no doubt it's a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed.
Mark Twain
#26. It's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know for sure that ain't true.
Mark Twain
#27. And whoever will take that motto and live by it will be likely to succeed. There's many a way to win, in this world, but none of them is worth much without good hard work back of it.
Mark Twain
#28. The devil's aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despots dread of a newspaper that laughs.
Mark Twain
#29. Hello Huckleberry!"
"Hello, yourself, and see how you like it."
"What's that you got?"
"Dead cat."
"Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff. Where'd you get him?"
"Bought him off'n a boy.
Mark Twain
#30. The Church still prizes the Moral Sense as man's noblest asset today, although the Church knows God had a distinctly poor opinion of it and did what he could in his clumsy way to keep his happy Children of the Garden from acquiring it.
Mark Twain
#31. 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
#32. No you can't." "I can." "You can't." "Can!" "Can't!" An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said: "What's your name?" "'Tisn't any of your business, maybe." "Well I 'low I'll MAKE it my business." "Well why don't you?" "If you say much, I will." "Much - much - MUCH. There now.
Mark Twain
#33. To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
Mark Twain
#34. Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.
Mark Twain
#36. I think there's something odd about eating another living anything.
Shania Twain
#37. It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you. And it is unsatisfactory to read to one's self anyhow - for the uttered voice so heightens the expression.
Mark Twain
#38. From the dome of St. Peter's one can see every notable object in Rome ... He can see a panorama that is varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history than any other in Europe.
Mark Twain
#39. This job's a pain-it's so mundane It sure don't stimulate my brain.
Shania Twain
#40. What's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
Mark Twain
#41. The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward.
Mark Twain
#42. The truth is, a person's memory has no more sense that his conscience, and no appreciation whatever of values and proportions.
Mark Twain
#43. If you play Mark Twain and he's not funny, you are definitely not playing Mark Twain. That was the biggest challenge, in some ways. Writing and performing jokes that can come out of that brilliant delivery system he constructed: the friendly, avuncular truth-teller.
Val Kilmer
#44. An adventure is something that while it's happening you wish it wasn't.
Mark Twain
#45. It's an awful snug place for orgies." "What orgies?" "I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we've got to have them, too.
Mark Twain
#46. Dysphonia is not a singing problem. It's a voice box issue in the muscle on the voice, very different from having a nodule on the vocal cords, which I've never had. I'm lucky that I've never had that. It needs a long renewal time, and even today, I am still addressing it.
Shania Twain
#47. The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Mark Twain
#48. There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.
Mark Twain
#49. This could be it, I think I'm in love. It's love this time ... It just seems to fit, I think I'm in love ... This love is mine.
Shania Twain
#50. Now, we'll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer's Gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood.
Mark Twain
#51. It's such an honor to receive the Mark Twain Prize. To get the same award that has been given to people like Bill Cosby, Tina Fey and Will Ferrell, it really makes me wonder ... why didn't I get this sooner?
Ellen DeGeneres
#53. That optimist of yours is always ready to turn hell's backyard into a play-ground.
Mark Twain
#55. I reck'n I knows sense when I sees it; en dey ain' no sense in sich doin's as dat.
Mark Twain
#56. If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool, they'll never find out.
Mark Twain
#57. I'm never at my best on television. There's a row of cameras between you and the audience, and it's very weird, very confusing.
Shania Twain
#58. Our consciences take NO notice of pain inflicted upon others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to US. In ALL cases without exception we are absolutely indifferent to another person's pain until his sufferings make us uncomfortable.
Mark Twain
#59. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
Mark Twain
#60. If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first.
Mark Twain
#61. It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.
Mark Twain
#62. Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five hundred years away easier than he can a thing that's only five hundred seconds off.
Mark Twain
#63. To the rear, sir - he's lost his leg!
Mark Twain
#64. Poor Desdemona! I am glad thy father's dead.
Thy match was mortal to him, and pure grief
Shore his old thread in twain.
William Shakespeare
#65. A woman's intuition is better than a man's. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.
Mark Twain
#66. 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
#67. When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times.
Mark Twain
#68. The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.
Mark Twain
#69. I'm all for prosperity. It's change I object to.
Mark Twain
#70. I spent a lot of my life holding back my cries, and I want to change that because it's not good for me.
Shania Twain
#71. I've been enjoying 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain that I picked up at the airport randomly. It's very witty and interesting to read about his time as a steamboat pilot.
Roman Coppola
#72. Tell me about a person's family, friends, and community, and I'll tell you what his opinions are.
Mark Twain
#73. To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable - like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Mark Twain
#74. I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.
Mark Twain
#75. It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
Mark Twain
#76. Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Mark Twain
#77. Well, I know. It's jam - that's what it is. Forty times I've said if you didn't let that jam alone I'd skin you. Hand me that switch.
Mark Twain
#78. It's better to be an optimist who is sometimes wrong than a pessimist who is always right
Mark Twain
#79. It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
Mark Twain
#80. I DO know lots of things that I don't remember, and remember lots of things that I don't know. It's so with every educated person.
Mark Twain
#81. Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.
Mark Twain
#82. Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying.
Mark Twain
#83. It's easy to make friends, but hard to get rid of them.
Mark Twain
#84. The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend is immortal
Mark Twain
#85. As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff Potter to its bosom and fondled him as lavishly as it had abused him before. But that sort of conduct is to the world's credit; therefore it is not well to find fault with it.
Mark Twain
#86. A book I suggest to everybody is called, "Mysterious Stranger" by Mark Twain. It's about Satan and his visit here. A good book.
Richard Ramirez
#87. A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain.
Mark Twain
#88. My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.
Debbie Macomber
#89. SIGURD. Man's will can do this and that; but fate rules in the deeds that shape our lives - so has it gone with us twain.
Henrik Ibsen
#90. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is still in print. They're debating right now over Mark Twain. He's still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are - they're there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country.
Wynton Marsalis
#91. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you's gwyne to git well agin.
Mark Twain
#92. Germany, the diseased world's bathhouse.
Mark Twain
#93. It's more important to be comfortable with you weight, no matter what it is, as long as you are healthy and energetic to meet the personal goals and demands you have set in your life.
Shania Twain
#94. Next to possessing genius one's self is the power of appreciating it in others.
Mark Twain
#95. The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
Mark Twain
#96. I was born with Halley's Comet and I expect to die upon its return
Mark Twain
#97. The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.
Mark Twain
#98. A man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first.
Mark Twain
#99. The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.
Mark Twain
#100. 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
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