Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Mark Twain
Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it.

Mark Twain
As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.

Mark Twain
Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.

Mark Twain
Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

Mark Twain
Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.

Mark Twain
I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

Mark Twain
Of the Mount Vesuvius:
I am glad I visited it, partly because it was well worth it, and chiefly because I shall never have to do it again.
Sometimes misquoted as: I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again.

Mark Twain
It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong, but no matter, the crowd follows it.

Mark Twain
When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is - heartbreaking bereavement.

Mark Twain
When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.

Mark Twain
Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

Mark Twain
Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly - a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

Mark Twain
When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

Mark Twain
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Mark Twain
The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

Mark Twain
Therein lies the defect of revenge: it's all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.

Mark Twain
A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.

Mark Twain
When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

Mark Twain
It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

Mark Twain