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.

• 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.

• Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.

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

• Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

• 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?

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

• Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

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

• The secret to getting ahead is getting started.

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

• A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.

• I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

• A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

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

  Pudd'nhead Wilson and Other Tales

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

• Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.

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

• 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.

  Tom Sawyer Abroad

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

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

• After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.

  The Diaries of Adam & Eve

• 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.

  Pudd'nhead Wilson

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

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

• Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

  Notebook

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

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

  Notebook

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

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

  Notebook

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

  Notebook

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

  Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

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

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

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

  Life on the Mississippi

• Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."[Mark Twain, a Biography]

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

  Christian Science

• The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

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

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• 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.

  What Is Man?

• 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 Prince and the Pauper

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

• The lack of money is the root of all evil.

• Write what you know.

  The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous andshallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what youknow ain't so'.

  Pudd'nhead Wilson

• Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

• A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

• No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

• Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

• In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

• It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.

• Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

  The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain

• In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

  The Innocents Abroad

• A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.

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

• What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.

• If books are not good company, where shall I find it?

• Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

• Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

• Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

• The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.

• Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.

• There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

  Life on the Mississippi

• To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.

  Joan of Arc

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

  Pudd'nhead Wilson

• One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

• When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.

  Pudd'nhead Wilson

• Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket"- which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET."- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

  Pudd'nhead Wilson

• We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

• But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.

  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

• Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.