Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

Mark Twain
There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.

Mark Twain
Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

Mark Twain
When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before —met him on the river.

Mark Twain
The bicycle had what is called the 'wabbles', and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. Against nature, but not against the laws of nature.

Mark Twain
It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.

Mark Twain
Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more restful.

Mark Twain
I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.

Mark Twain
My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

Mark Twain
"Let the child go," said he; "ye heartless dogs, do ye not see how young and frail he is? Let him go—I will take his lashes."

Mark Twain
Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him—his brain—have made that tool singularly competent...

Mark Twain
It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.

Mark Twain
It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off.

Mark Twain
Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.

Mark Twain
But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it.

Mark Twain
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

Mark Twain
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.

Mark Twain
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 creature that cannot.

Mark Twain
I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.

Mark Twain
To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life;

Mark Twain
I do not know what we should do without the pulpit. We could better spare the sun-the moon, anyway.

Mark Twain
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.

Mark Twain
There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration—and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go.... Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.

Mark Twain
Within the last quarter of a century, in America, several sects of curers have appeared under various names and have done notable things in the way of healing ailments without the use of medicines. There are the Mind Cure, the Faith Cure, the Prayer Cure, the Mental Science Cure, and the Christian-Science Cure; and apparently they all do their miracles with the same old, powerful instrument—the patient's imagination. Differing names, but no difference in the process. But they do not give that instrument the credit; each sect claims that its way differs from the ways of the others.

Mark Twain
A soiled baby, with a neglected nose, cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty; and inasmuch as babyhood spans but three short years, no baby is competent to be a joy forever.

Mark Twain
Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.

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

Mark Twain
The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.

Mark Twain
God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New—the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.

Mark Twain
I have had a "call" to literature, of a low order— i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit... seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God's creatures.

Mark Twain