Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

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
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
The first act of the three occupied two hours. I enjoyed that in spite of the singing.

Mark Twain
The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

Mark Twain
We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change places with an easy and blessed facility.

Mark Twain
I beseech your good lordship that order be taken to change this law—oh, let no more poor creatures be visited with its tortures.

Mark Twain
In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.

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
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
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
So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.

Mark Twain
A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty.

Mark Twain
The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous 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
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
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
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
Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain