Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

It is hard enough luck being a monarch, without being a target also.

Mark Twain
Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it.

Mark Twain
Thanksgiving Day - Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.

Mark Twain
Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by, you only regret that you didn't see him do it.

Mark Twain
It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes...

Mark Twain
Isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.

Mark Twain
The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

Mark Twain
Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.

Mark Twain
The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin]

Mark Twain
In other localities certain places in the streams are much better than others, but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere.

Mark Twain
Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance.

Mark Twain
There's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.

Mark Twain
Look at the mother of Washington! She raised a boy that could not tell a lie--could not tell a lie! But he never had any chance. It might have been different if he had belonged to the Washington Newspaper Correspondents' Club

Mark Twain
Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing.

Mark Twain
The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.

Mark Twain
There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail.

Mark Twain
I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

Mark Twain
I have been cautioned to talk but be careful not to say anything. I do not consider this a difficult task.

Mark Twain
Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.

Mark Twain
Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

Mark Twain
When we do not know a person - and also when we do - we have to judge his size by the size and nature of his achievements, as compared with the achievements of others in his special line of business - there is no other way.

Mark Twain
Who would find out that I am a natural fool if I kept always cool and never let nature come to the surface? Nobody.

Mark Twain
No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.

Mark Twain
What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.

Mark Twain
Unexpected money is a delight. The same sum is a bitterness when you expected more.

Mark Twain
Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.

Mark Twain
The sole impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs.... It is our only spur, our whip, our goad, our impelling power; we have no other.

Mark Twain
As for the dinosaur - But Noah's conscience was easy; it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal and America had not then been discovered.

Mark Twain
If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool, they'll never find out.

Mark Twain
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning;... I should be sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life.

Mark Twain