Mark Twain Quotes
-
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.
-
George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
-
To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
-
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.
-
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
-
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
-
It is my hope sir, that the ass who invented the 'age of consent'-any age of consent between cradle and grave-is with his progenitors in hell, and that the legislatures that are keeping the resulting law in force will follow him soon.
-
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
-
Brooklyn praise is half slander.
-
The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.
-
....it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence.
-
...a professor in one of the great female colleges. That odious form is common, and I submit and use it, though it offends me as much as it would to say female brickbat or female snow-storm or female geography.
-
The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.
-
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
-
It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.
-
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
-
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.
-
I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.
-
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.
-
Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.
-
Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
-
We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
-
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
-
The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds! You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.