Mark Twain Quotes

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The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.

Mark Twain
Nevertheless we have this curious spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination, and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself. It does seem as if we ought to be humble when we are at a bench-show, and not put on airs of intellectual superiority there.

Mark Twain
The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.

Mark Twain
You must not pay a person a compliment, and then straightway follow it with a criticism.

Mark Twain
Missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All you had to do was to cure the head savage´s sick daughter by a miracle- a miracle like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance- and immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes with a new convert´s enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself easy now. He would take the ax and convert the rest of the nation himself.

Mark Twain
Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had to learn more than any one man ought to learn; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours.

Mark Twain
Simple rules for saving money: To save half, when you are fired by an eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait and count to forty. To save three quarters, count sixty. To save all, count sixty-five.

Mark Twain
If it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary

Mark Twain
Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being "loyal" to a thousand iniquities, whereas the true loyalty should have been to themselves - in which case there would have ensured a rebellion, and the throwing off of that deceptive yoke.

Mark Twain
You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught.

Mark Twain
There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others.

Mark Twain
If the Christians of America could be persuaded to vote God and a clean ticket, it would bring about a moral revolution that would be incalculably beneficent. It would save the country.

Mark Twain
Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces-and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train.

Mark Twain
There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory. The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the deity nor his son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled.

Mark Twain
The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.

Mark Twain
You may have noticed that the less I know about a subject the more confidence I have, and the more new light I throw on it.

Mark Twain
Every man is in his own person the whole human race without a detail lacking....I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born.

Mark Twain
The very "marks" on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy.

Mark Twain
Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

Mark Twain
Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.

Mark Twain
The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was.

Mark Twain
You cannot make an oyster out of whole cloth, you must make the oyster's ancestor first. This is not done in a day. You must make a vast variety or invertebrates, to start with — belemnites, trilobites, jebustites, Amalekites, and that sort of fry, and put them to soak in a primary sea, and wait and see what will happen.

Mark Twain
The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you.

Mark Twain
For three hundred years now, the Christian astronomer has known that his Deity didn't make the stars in those tremendous six days; but the Christian astronomer doesn't enlarge upon that detail. Neither does the priest.

Mark Twain
If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people

Mark Twain
It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same. There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of values.

Mark Twain
To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

Mark Twain
Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs?

Mark Twain
The smell of sulphur is strong, but not unpleasant for a sinner.

Mark Twain
A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

Mark Twain