Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.

Mark Twain
I wish to come down eighteen hundred years later and refer to a remark made by one of the Latin historians. Some Christians were persecuted in Rome through error, they being 'mistaken for Jews.' The meaning seems plain. These pagans had nothing against Christians, but they were quite ready to persecute Jews. For some reason or other they hated a Jew before they even knew what a Christian was. May I not assume, then, that the persecution of Jews is a thing which antedates Christianity and was not born of Christianity?

Mark Twain
India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.

Mark Twain
The business aspects of the Fourth of July is not perfect as it stands. See what it costs us every year with loss of life, the crippling of thousands with its fireworks, and the burning down of property. It is not only sacred to patriotism and universal freedom, but to the surgeon, the undertaker, the insurance offices - and they are working it for all it is worth.

Mark Twain
Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.

Mark Twain
Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.

Mark Twain
What dost thou know of suffering and oppression? I and my people know, but not thou.

Mark Twain
Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.

Mark Twain
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

Mark Twain
It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

Mark Twain
His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.

Mark Twain
Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

Mark Twain
What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought!... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

Mark Twain
There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.

Mark Twain
Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them all, and do it without shame. Because honor to party is above honor to themselves.

Mark Twain
Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom.

Mark Twain
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.

Mark Twain
I begin to see that a man's got to be in his own heaven to be happy.

Mark Twain
Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more.

Mark Twain
I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.

Mark Twain
It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about. He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness of his company--for he did all the talking.

Mark Twain
My interest in my work dies a sudden and violent death when the work is done.

Mark Twain
Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Don't be fooled by this absurd law; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him.

Mark Twain
Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'

Mark Twain
Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.

Mark Twain
The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.

Mark Twain
In prayer we call ourselves 'worms of the dust', but it is only on a sort of tacit understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par.

Mark Twain
There was no response, for a moment, in that deep darkness and that graveyard hush. But when the silver rim of the sun pushed itself out a moment or two later, the assemblage broke loose with a vast shout and came pouring down like a deluge to smother me with blessings and gratitude.

Mark Twain
Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.

Mark Twain
All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth--including America, of course-- consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty occupies a foot of land that was not stolen.

Mark Twain