Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

The old saw says, 'Let a sleeping dog lie.' Right. Still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it.

Mark Twain
Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.

Mark Twain
I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.

Mark Twain
All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The reflection that they-like Columbus-didn't discover what they expected to discover, and didn't discover what they started out to discover, doesn't trouble them. All they remember is that they discovered America; they forget that they started out to discover some patch or corner of India.

Mark Twain
If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is.

Mark Twain
I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

Mark Twain
Somehow, every time the magic of fol-de-rol tried conclusions with the magic of science, the magic of fol-de-rol got left.

Mark Twain
Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lighting-flash, the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain.

Mark Twain
This autobiography of mine is a mirror, and I am looking at myself in it all the time. Incidentally I notice the people that pass along at my back - I get glimpses of them in the mirror - and whenever they say or do anything that can help advertise me and flatter me and raise me in my own estimation, I set these things down in my autobiography.

Mark Twain
I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.

Mark Twain
A man may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands.

Mark Twain
It is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and not kick.

Mark Twain
For a forgotten fact is news when it comes again.

Mark Twain
We called him Barney for short. We couldn't use his real name, there wasn't time.

Mark Twain
That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they are and get bribes for it and become wealthy.

Mark Twain
I thoroughly believe that any man who's got anything worthwhile to say will be heard if he only says it often enough.

Mark Twain
The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it.

Mark Twain
The highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor.

Mark Twain
I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy.

Mark Twain
Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

Mark Twain