Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

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

Mark Twain
Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.

Mark Twain
I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.

Mark Twain
Such is professional jealousy; a scientist will never show any kindness for a theory which he did not start himself.

Mark Twain
[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights... sexual intercourse!... His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Mark Twain
The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.

Mark Twain
Of all the creatures that were made he [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one — the solitary one — that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices — the most hateful... He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain... Also — in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.

Mark Twain
That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.

Mark Twain
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.

Mark Twain
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

Mark Twain
We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books- theoretically at least.

Mark Twain
Optimist: person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness.

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

Mark Twain
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience — 4000 critics.

Mark Twain
Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.

Mark Twain
Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

Mark Twain
To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

Mark Twain
The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage. One tells them from vinegar by the label.

Mark Twain
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
I have not professionally dealt in truth. Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there.

Mark Twain
We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat.

Mark Twain
A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.

Mark Twain
I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little—not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.

Mark Twain
Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel.

Mark Twain
My first American ancestor, gentlemen, was an Indian-an early Indian. Your ancestors skinned him alive, and I am an orphan. All those Salem witches were ancestors of mine. Your people made it tropical for them.... The first slave brought into New England out of Africa was an ancestor of mine-for I am a mixed breed, an infinitely shaded and exquisite Mongrel.

Mark Twain
A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.

Mark Twain
Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

Mark Twain
The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bills like everything.

Mark Twain
Probably there is an imperceptible touch of something permanent that one feels instinctively to adhere to true humour, whereas wit may be the mere conversational shooting up of "smartness"—a bright feather, to be blown into space the second after it is launched...Wit seems to be counted a very poor relation to Humour....Humour is never artificial.

Mark Twain
The church is always trying to get other people to reform, it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example

Mark Twain