Mark Twain Quotes

1,400 Sourced Quotes

Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.

Mark Twain
I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

Mark Twain
Of the Mount Vesuvius:
I am glad I visited it, partly because it was well worth it, and chiefly because I shall never have to do it again.
Sometimes misquoted as: I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again.

Mark Twain
It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong, but no matter, the crowd follows it.

Mark Twain
When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is - heartbreaking bereavement.

Mark Twain
When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.

Mark Twain
Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

Mark Twain
Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly - a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

Mark Twain
When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

Mark Twain
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Mark Twain
The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

Mark Twain
Therein lies the defect of revenge: it's all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it.

Mark Twain
A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.

Mark Twain
When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.

Mark Twain
It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

Mark Twain
There is a Moral Sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive Immorality and how to enjoy it.

Mark Twain
It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make as good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.

Mark Twain
Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that did not exist before.

Mark Twain
I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning... the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.

Mark Twain
Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane—but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a man, it is evidence that you are a lunatic.

Mark Twain
You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.

Mark Twain
The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.

Mark Twain
But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

Mark Twain
The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.

Mark Twain
A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.

Mark Twain
I had another convulsion of pleasure when Yale made me a Doctor of Literature, because I was not competent to doctor anybody's literature but my own.

Mark Twain
Citing a familiar "American joke":
In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?

Mark Twain
To my mind, Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

Mark Twain
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.

Mark Twain
No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

Mark Twain