Mark Twain Quotes
-
Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.
-
Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
-
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
-
William Dean Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit I would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must be my way.
-
Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
-
Brooklyn praise is half slander.
-
You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it. You are too much ashamed of yourself. It is too disgusting. For that reason I confine myself to drawing the portraits of others.
-
Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.
-
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!
-
It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.
-
James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine, was seriously ill two or three weeks ago in London, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness; the report of my death was an exaggeration.
-
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.
-
There was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only 'hooking,' while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing - and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.
-
'In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot'
-
The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.
-
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
-
Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.
-
I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.
-
The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod - and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.
-
She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
-
If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
-
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
-
Everybody yelled at him, and laughed at him, and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now, because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, 'Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on.'
-
The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.