Authors — Quotes

Mark Twain Quotes: 125

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
′Classic′ - a book which people praise and don't read.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
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.
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.
Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
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.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.
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.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.
The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
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.
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.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.
If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
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.
The Innocents Abroad/Roughing It
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.