Mark Twain - Man Quotes

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Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down-- he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.

Mark Twain
An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.

Mark Twain
No one doubts—certainly not I—that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist have made use of the client's imagination to help them in their work. They have all recognized the potency and availability of that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that where the disease is only a fancy, the patient's confidence in the doctor will make the bread pill effective.

Mark Twain
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
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
It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

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

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

Mark Twain
A man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first.

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
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
S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy - what would you think?

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

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
Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.

Mark Twain
Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

Mark Twain
When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.

Mark Twain
The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

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
Try the mustard, - a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard.

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
No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.

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
I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake.... When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder!

Mark Twain
The average man's a coward... The average man don't like trouble and danger.

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
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
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
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