Quotes by Mark Twain

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.

I can last two months on a good compliment.

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

God created war so that Americans would learn geography.

I am only human, although I regret it.

I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

The truth hurts, but silence kills.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Architects cannot teach nature anything.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

He gossips habitually; he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue.

Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life.

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't.

Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.

The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.

The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.

When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.

Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.

Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.

Write what you know.

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.

Don't wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

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.

When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.

Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.

The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.

Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.

Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Comparison is the death of joy.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.

Be good and you will be lonesome.

Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.

There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.

A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.

Worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.

The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.

In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt

My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

All right, then, I'll go to hell.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.

Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

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.

The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.

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.

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

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

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

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

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

The secret to getting ahead is getting started.

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

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.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.

Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

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.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

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.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and-nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stock snuggles into your heart in the same way.

Everything has its limit -- iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

A little citizenship ought to be taught at the mother's knee and in the nursery.

Good citizenship would teach accuracy of thinking and accuracy of statement.

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

A man with a hump backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross eyed aunt.

Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

A man will do many things to get himself loved. He will do all things to get himself envied.

A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public.

Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.

Consider the average intelligence of the common man, then realize 50% are even stupider.

A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.

A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.

An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music.

Custom is petrification, nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.

I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.

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

All human rules are more or less idiotic.

In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience.

A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.

Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.

I do not allow my schooling to interfere with my education.

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?

A sense of humor is the one thing no one will admit to not having.

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

I deal with temptation by yielding to it.

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.