Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

I believe I would rather ride a donkey than any beast in the world. He goes briskly, he puts on no airs, he is docile, though opinionated. Satan himself could not scare him, and he is convenient — very convenient. When you are tired riding you can rest your feet on the ground and let him gallop from under you.

Mark Twain
The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession-and take the credit of the correction.

Mark Twain
Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by.

Mark Twain
Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.

Mark Twain
If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.

Mark Twain
An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music.

Mark Twain
All good things arrive unto them that wait - and don't die in the meantime.

Mark Twain
Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?

Mark Twain
The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might.

Mark Twain
There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it.

Mark Twain
In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

Mark Twain
Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value.

Mark Twain
It is curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing, nickel-plated word has for you.

Mark Twain
The average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.

Mark Twain
Honesty is often the best policy, but sometimes the appearance of it is worth six of it.

Mark Twain
Balloon: Thing to take meteroric observations and commit suicide with.

Mark Twain
But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.

Mark Twain
There is no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from our steeples.

Mark Twain
Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures?

Mark Twain
The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities.

Mark Twain
The two Great Unknowns, the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities! They are the best known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet.

Mark Twain
I cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive.

Mark Twain
Most of Sir Dinadan's jokes were rotten and the rest were petrified. I said "petrified" was good; as I believed, myself, that the only right way to classify the majestic ages of some of those jokes was by geologic periods. But that neat idea hit the boy in a blank place, for geology hadn't been invented yet.

Mark Twain
I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning-knowing well that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses and hypocrisies and cruelties that make up civilization, and cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race. I cannot seem to get my prayers answered, yet I do not despair.

Mark Twain
There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it.

Mark Twain
Does the human being reason? No; he thinks, muses, reflects, but does not reason...that is, in the two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind, politics and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more.

Mark Twain
We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.

Mark Twain
We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.

Mark Twain
Every time I reform in one direction I go overboard in another.

Mark Twain
Suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind - your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work.

Mark Twain