Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort.

Mark Twain
Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.

Mark Twain
I always did hate for anyone to know what my plans or hopes or prospects were—for, if I kept people in ignorance in these matters, no one could be disappointed but myself, if they were not realized.

Mark Twain
More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.

Mark Twain
That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.

Mark Twain
Written things are not for speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue-where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized and turned into common forms of premeditated talk-otherwise they will bore the house and not entertain it.

Mark Twain
The laws of Nature, that is to say the laws of God, plainly made every human being a law unto himself, we must steadfastly refuse to obey those laws, and we must as steadfastly stand by the conventions which ignore them, since the statutes furnish us peace, fairly good government, and stability, and therefore are better for us than the laws of God, which would soon plunge us into confusion and disorder and anarchy if we should adopt them.

Mark Twain
Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.

Mark Twain
A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt

Mark Twain
Fire is beautiful; some day it will be useful, I think.

Mark Twain
The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. Man gets his through months and months of cruel torture; he will never get a set which can really be depended on 'till a dentist makes him one.

Mark Twain
A half-educated physician is not valuable. He thinks he can cure everything.

Mark Twain
Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.

Mark Twain
Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season.

Mark Twain
A jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful purpose, and is valuable to the world because he is a jackass; but anobleman is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place. And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know what is going to come of it.

Mark Twain
None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try.

Mark Twain
You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.

Mark Twain
A healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation.

Mark Twain
To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye-what ye say of me is now of no consequence.

Mark Twain
It occurs to me now that I have never seen the ice-storm put upon canvas, and have not heard that any painter has tried to do it. I wonder why that is. Is it that paint cannot counterfeit the intense blaze of a sun-flooded jewel?

Mark Twain
The devil's aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despots dread of a newspaper that laughs.

Mark Twain
Heroine: girl who is perfectly charming to live with, in a book.

Mark Twain
There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.

Mark Twain
A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial.

Mark Twain
Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.

Mark Twain
A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

Mark Twain
Name the greatest of all the inventors: Accident.

Mark Twain
In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm.

Mark Twain
There's another trouble about theories: there's always a hole in them somewheres, sure, if you look close enough. It's just so with this one of Jim's. Look what billions and billions of stars there is. How does it come that there was just exactly enough star-stuff, and none left over? How does it come there ain't no sand-pile up there?

Mark Twain
We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the habits of the oyster. It seems almost certain that we have been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster.

Mark Twain