Mark Twain - Man Quotes

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A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it.

Mark Twain
We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks - if we agree with him.

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

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

Mark Twain
Come, cheer up, old man; there's no use in losing your grip and going back to this child's play merely because this big sunspot is drifting across your shiny new disk.

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
I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.

Mark Twain
What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.

Mark Twain
What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.... The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.... When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.

Mark Twain
Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.

Mark Twain
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

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

Mark Twain
Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.

Mark Twain
What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light.

Mark Twain
All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.

Mark Twain
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Mark Twain
When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?

Mark Twain
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

Mark Twain
An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect.

Mark Twain
I was educated, I was trained, I was a Presbyterian and I knew how these things are done. I knew that in Biblical times if a man committed a sin the extermination of the whole surrounding nation-cattle and all-was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after.

Mark Twain
But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.

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
He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man — and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.

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

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
If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.

Mark Twain
The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.

Mark Twain