Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.

Mark Twain
When I take up one of Jane Austen's books…I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.

Mark Twain
Some German words are so long that they have a perspective.

Mark Twain
A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Mark Twain
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Mark Twain
If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

Mark Twain
There isn't time—so brief is life—for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving—and but an instant, so to speak, for that.

Mark Twain
It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

Mark Twain
I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

Mark Twain
These wisdoms are for the luring of youth toward high moral altitudes. The author did not gather them from practice, but from observation. To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.

Mark Twain
They spell it "Vinci" and pronounce it "Vinchy". Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.

Mark Twain
There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing

Mark Twain
No doubt the great majority of them are in the cemetery long ago, and I suppose the rest of us will join them before long. Speaking for myself I am willing; in fact I believe I have been willing ever since I was eighteen years old; not urgent, but willing, merely willing.

Mark Twain
It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.

Mark Twain
I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.

Mark Twain
To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment will do.

Mark Twain
Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene

Mark Twain
So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.

Mark Twain
It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

Mark Twain
My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.

Mark Twain
He [George Washington Cable] has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.

Mark Twain
You may say organize, organize, organize; but there may be so much organization that it will interfere with the work to be done.

Mark Twain
How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!

Mark Twain
Carlyle said "a lie cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted me ages ago.

Mark Twain
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

Mark Twain
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

Mark Twain
Laws are sand, customs are rock. Law can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

Mark Twain
As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

Mark Twain
When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there- in sunny weather- stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose.

Mark Twain
Don't you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can.

Mark Twain