Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.

Mark Twain
They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin' ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property.

Mark Twain
I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can't be made to do it in any possible way.

Mark Twain
The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to the heart, and seeing it done.

Mark Twain
It is impossible that a genius - at least a literary genius - can ever be discovered by his intimates; they are so close to him that he is out of focus to them and they can't get at his proportions; they can't perceive that there is any considerable difference between his bulk and their own.

Mark Twain
People who always feel jolly, no matter where they are or what happens to them—who have the organ of hope preposterously developed—who are endowed with an uncongealable sanguine temperament—who never feel concerned about the price of corn—and who cannot, by any possibility, discover any but the bright side of a picture—are very apt to go to extremes, and exaggerate with 40-horse microscopic power.

Mark Twain
Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping... you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.

Mark Twain
[I] shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. Indeed, upon second thought, I will not use it then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading--though to speak truly I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it.

Mark Twain
Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results

Mark Twain
The Taj has had no rival among the temples and palaces of men, none that even remotely approached it — it was man's architectural ice-storm.

Mark Twain
Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death!

Mark Twain
But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon "made ground"; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others.

Mark Twain
You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

Mark Twain
More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.

Mark Twain
Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale.

Mark Twain
No, I have no desire for riches. Honest poverty and a conscience, torpid through virtuous inaction, are more to me than corner lots and praise.

Mark Twain
In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.

Mark Twain
In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience.

Mark Twain
An occasional compliment is necessary to keep up one's self-respect.

Mark Twain
The average man's a coward... The average man don't like trouble and danger.

Mark Twain
The thing for us to do is just to do our duty, and not worry about whether anybody sees us do it or not.

Mark Twain
Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That, of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still, while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable.

Mark Twain
I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.

Mark Twain
He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel; he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed-kind of a syndicate; and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that's left over.

Mark Twain
To one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest.

Mark Twain
When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.

Mark Twain
An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before.

Mark Twain
Frankenstein took some flesh and bones and blood and made a man out of them; the man ran away and fell to raping and robbing and murdering everywhere, and Frankenstein was horrified and in despair, and said, I made him, without asking his consent, and it makes me responsible for every crime he commits. I am the criminal, he is innocent.

Mark Twain
A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once-not oftener.

Mark Twain
Always dress a fact in tights, never in an ulster.

Mark Twain