Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

Mark Twain
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

Mark Twain
Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs—the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest—you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.

Mark Twain
You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does — but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use.

Mark Twain
I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

Mark Twain
It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval.

Mark Twain
An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.

Mark Twain
We began to stir against slavery. Hearts grew soft, here, there, and yonder. There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one—the pulpit. It yielded at last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession—at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery text remained; the practice changed, that was all.

Mark Twain
It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail.

Mark Twain
I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Mark Twain
I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself.

Mark Twain
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

Mark Twain
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Mark Twain
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it— and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Mark Twain
Some things you can't find out; but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing: no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.

Mark Twain
If there was two birds sitting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first.

Mark Twain
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.

Mark Twain
I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.

Mark Twain
Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

Mark Twain
His grammar is foolishly correct, offensively precise. It flaunts itself in the reader's face all along, and struts and smirks and shows off, and is in a dozen ways irritating and disagreeable. To be serious, I write good grammar myself, but not in that spirit, I am thankful to say. That is to say, my grammar is of a high order, though not at the top. Nobody's is. Perfect grammar—persistent, continuous, sustained—is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.

Mark Twain
Citizenship? We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last refuge of the scoundrel — and I believe that he was right. I remember when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country.

Mark Twain
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

Mark Twain
Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts? [...] Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity.

Mark Twain
As a rule, we go about with masks, we go about looking honest, and we are able to conceal ourselves all through the day.

Mark Twain
It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience.

Mark Twain
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

Mark Twain
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

Mark Twain
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself...Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Mark Twain
What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.
Sometimes misquoted as: What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.

Mark Twain
One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself

Mark Twain