Mark Twain Quotes
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It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
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The bicycle had what is called the 'wabbles', and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. Against nature, but not against the laws of nature.
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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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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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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 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.
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Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
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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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I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.
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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.
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...from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this.)
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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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Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it.
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I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
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My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
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Adam, at Eve's grave: Wheresoever she was, THERE was Eden.
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We have been housekeeping a fortnight, now-long enough to have learned how to pronounce the servants' names, but not how to spell them. We shan't ever learn to spell them; they were invented in Hungary and Poland, and on paper they look like the alphabet out on a drunk.
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There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
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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.
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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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Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him-his brain-have made that tool singularly competent...
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A critic never made or killed a book or a play. The people themselves are the final judges. It is their opinion that counts. After all, the final test is truth. But the trouble is that most writers regard truth as their most valuable possession and therefore are most economical in its use.
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The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.