Mark Twain - Man Quotes

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He says every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.

Mark Twain
When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself.

Mark Twain
God's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

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
The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty

Mark Twain
Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.

Mark Twain
I wanted to damage every man in the place, and every woman—and not in their bodies or in their estate, but in their vanity—the place where feeble and foolish people are most vulnerable. So I disguised myself and came back and studied you. You were easy game. You had an old and lofty reputation for honesty, and naturally you were proud of it — it was your treasure of treasures, the very apple of your eye. As soon as I found out that you carefully and vigilantly kept yourselves and your children out of temptation, I knew how to proceed. Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.

Mark Twain
Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

Mark Twain
The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.

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
It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.

Mark Twain
Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.

Mark Twain
A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

Mark Twain
It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth.

Mark Twain
The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

Mark Twain
If there is one thing that will make a man peculiarly and insufferable self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick.

Mark Twain
I begin to see that a man's got to be in his own heaven to be happy.

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

Mark Twain
The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Mark Twain
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. It is said that leaders are readers. However if they read trashy magazines for the majority of their time and they never run with the information that they glean from resourceful books, then they may as well have not taken any time to read at all. It is easier to stay out than get out.

Mark Twain
The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is—a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness.

Mark Twain
There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it.

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
Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for it—risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.

Mark Twain
Of all the creatures that were made he [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one — the solitary one — that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices — the most hateful... He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain... Also — in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.

Mark Twain
I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.

Mark Twain
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

Mark Twain
Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

Mark Twain
How unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant.

Mark Twain