Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty. If it is loaded my immortal and inflexible purpose is to get over the fence and go home. My invariable practice in war has been to bring out of every fight two-thirds more men than when I went in. This seems to me Napoleonic in its grandeur.

Mark Twain
To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals.

Mark Twain
What chance has the ignorant, uncultivated liar against the educated expert? What chance have I…against a lawyer?

Mark Twain
There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

Mark Twain
There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it and when he can.

Mark Twain
Tell the truth or trump — but get the trick.

Mark Twain
I would not rob you of your food or your clothes or your umbrella, but if I caught your German out I would take it. But I don't study any more,- I have given it up.

Mark Twain
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;

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

Mark Twain
I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian's inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business—in either straight business or the questionable sort.

Mark Twain
The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod — and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.

Mark Twain
The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

Mark Twain
I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument an an unsuspected yearning to play on it, which are bound to wake up an demand attention someday. Therefore you who rail at such that disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a guitar, beware! For sooner or later your own time will come.

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

Mark Twain
I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.

Mark Twain
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.

Mark Twain
I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all — they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me — and this adverb plague is one of them.

Mark Twain
Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.

Mark Twain
Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.

Mark Twain
The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.

Mark Twain
Eight grown Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone-if still alive.

Mark Twain
At bottom he was probably fond of them [Americans], but he was always able to conceal it.
Of Thomas Carlyle

Mark Twain
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
I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.

Mark Twain
An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

Mark Twain
You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient 'people say.'

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

Mark Twain
I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake.... When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder!

Mark Twain
Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.

Mark Twain
It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people [the Filipinos] free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

Mark Twain