Mark Twain Quotes
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It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
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It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
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She takes an undaughterful pleasure in noting that now the newspapers are beginning to concede with heartiness that she does not need the help of my name, but can make her way quite satisfactorily upon her own merits. This is insubordination, and must be crushed.
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Try as you may, you don't get down as you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire. You make a spectacle of yourself every time.
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Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
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The first thing I ever noticed about Miss Lyon was her incredible laziness. Laziness was my own specialty, & I did not like this competition. Dear me, I was to find out, in the course of time, that in the matter of laziness I was a runaway train on a down grade & she a-standing still. At my very laziest I could hear myself whiz, when she was around.
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Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.
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Don't let schooling interfere with your education.
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'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'
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What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.
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Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
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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.
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Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
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The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
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In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.
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When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.
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I have seen it stated that no expert is quick enough to run over a dog; that a dog is always able to skip out of his way. I think that that may be true; but I think that the reason he couldn't run over the dog was because he was trying to. I did not try to run over any dog. But I ran over every dog that came along.
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That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. When a thoughtful and unblessed Mohammedan examines the Westminster Catechism, he knows that beyond any question I am spiritually insane.
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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
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Adam, at Eve's grave: Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden.
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H'aint we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
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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.
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My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
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The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.