Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a really beautiful woman is after considerable acquaintance with her; and the rule applies to Niagara Falls, to majestic mountains, and to mosques-especially to mosques.

Mark Twain
Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

Mark Twain
In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.

Mark Twain
That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration-and it was on the first day of it, too-was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways.

Mark Twain
I reverently believe that the maker who made us all makes everything in New England, but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerks factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.

Mark Twain
No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.

Mark Twain
Ours is the "land of the free"-nobody denies that-nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.)

Mark Twain
I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with the blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.

Mark Twain
It is not a new thing for a thoroughly good and well-meaning preacher´s soft heart to run away with his soft head.

Mark Twain
Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.

Mark Twain
Troubles are only mental; it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them.

Mark Twain
By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.

Mark Twain
Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag.

Mark Twain
No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.

Mark Twain
The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter...

Mark Twain
I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.

Mark Twain
It is poison - rank poison - to knuckle down to care and hardships. They must come to us all, albeit in different shapes, and we may not escape them. It is not possible. But we may swindle them out of half of their puissance with a stiff upper lip.

Mark Twain
The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.

Mark Twain
Training- training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.

Mark Twain
These people´s God has shown them by a million acts that he respects none of the Bible´s statues. He breaks every one of them himself, adultery and all.

Mark Twain
There are no accidents, all things have a deep and calculated purpose; sometimes the methods employed by Providence seem strange and incongruous, but we have only to be patient and wait for the result: then we recognize that no others would have answered the purpose, and we are rebuked and humbled.

Mark Twain
Do not offer a compliment and ask a favor at the same time. A compliment that is charged for is not valuable.

Mark Twain
You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it.

Mark Twain
Nothing ever satisfies her [Eve] but demonstration; untested theories are not in her line, and she won't have them.

Mark Twain
Among other common lies, we have the silent lie - the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.

Mark Twain
In America the ice-storm is an event. And it is not an event which one is careless about. When it comes, the news flies from room to room in the house, there are bangings on the doors, and shoutings, "The ice-storm! the ice-storm!" and even the laziest sleepers throw off the covers and join the rush for the windows.

Mark Twain
In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.

Mark Twain
This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast.

Mark Twain
It's as simple as tit-tat-toe, three-in-a-row, and as easy as playing hooky. I should hope we can find a way that's a little more complicated than that...

Mark Twain
The equator was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried to grab it.

Mark Twain