Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

The distant dogs howled, the melancholy kine complained, and the winds went on raging, whilst furious sheets of rain drove along the roof; but the Majesty of England slept on, undisturbed, and the calf did the same, it being a simple creature, and not easily troubled by storms or embarrassed by sleeping with a king.

Mark Twain
Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak — like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support — something that ought to be arrested.

Mark Twain
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.

Mark Twain
Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars, and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But, after all, it is an overstatement.
If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their trust in The Health Board...

Mark Twain
Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

Mark Twain
I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way.

Mark Twain
Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him that I hadn't any.

Mark Twain
A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.

Mark Twain
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.

Mark Twain
I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schoisched with a step peculiar to myself - and the kangaroo.

Mark Twain
Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects."

Mark Twain
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. It is said that leaders are readers. However if they read trashy magazines for the majority of their time and they never run with the information that they glean from resourceful books, then they may as well have not taken any time to read at all. It is easier to stay out than get out.

Mark Twain
Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.

Mark Twain
As soon as a man recognizes that he has drifted into age, he gets reminiscent. He wants to talk and talk; and not about the present or the future, but about his old times. For there is where the pathos of his life lies - and the charm of it. The pathos of it is there because it was opulent with treasures that are gone, and the charm of it is in casting them up from the musty ledgers and remembering how rich and gracious they were.

Mark Twain
The average American's simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak.

Mark Twain
Everybody yelled at him, and laughed at him, and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now, because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on."

Mark Twain
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome.

Mark Twain
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.

Mark Twain
No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

Mark Twain
Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.

Mark Twain
The most permanent lessons in morals are those which come, not of book teaching, but of experience.

Mark Twain
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

Mark Twain
Definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Mark Twain
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Mark Twain
A reputable lawyer will advise you to keep out of the law, make the best of a foolish bargain, and not get caught again.

Mark Twain
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain't so.

Mark Twain
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.

Mark Twain
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

Mark Twain
One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.

Mark Twain
It is better to take what does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

Mark Twain