Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

The person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

Mark Twain
We can't always have the beautiful aspect of things. Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful and let the others go

Mark Twain
Circumstance - which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final and must be obeyed by all - and will be

Mark Twain
I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible.

Mark Twain
Pardon, once more; if you are going to load any thing more on to that statement, you want to get a couple of lighters and tow the rest, because it's drawing all the water there is in the river already; stick to facts - just stick to the cold facts.

Mark Twain
The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong. He can swear and still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way.

Mark Twain
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.

Mark Twain
Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for.

Mark Twain
Senator: Person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time.

Mark Twain
A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

Mark Twain
There's some human instinct which makes a man treasure what he is not to make any use of, because everybody does not possess it.

Mark Twain
It would not be possible for Noah to do in our day what he was permitted to do in his own... The inspector would come and examine the Ark, and make all sorts of objections.

Mark Twain
The spirit of wrath - not the words - is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.

Mark Twain
Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case.

Mark Twain
If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.

Mark Twain
The blackbird is a perfect gentleman, in deportment and attire, and is not noisy, I believe, except when holding religious services and political conventions in a tree.

Mark Twain
The fear of lightning is one of the most distressing infirmities a human being can be afflicted with. It is mostly confined to women, but now and then you find it in a little dog, and sometimes a man.

Mark Twain
A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.

Mark Twain
There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.

Mark Twain
No man, deep down in the privacy of his heart, has any considerable respect for himself.

Mark Twain
What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

Mark Twain
When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do: throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the quickest.

Mark Twain
What a lie it is to call this a free country, where none but the unworthy and undeserving may swear.

Mark Twain
The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost - not another man's - is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases.

Mark Twain
Being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be. It's just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time.

Mark Twain
I had been to school... and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway.

Mark Twain
When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable.

Mark Twain
It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely overrated bird. During the many summers, now, I have watched him, when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one.

Mark Twain
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain.

Mark Twain
Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.

Mark Twain