-
I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
Mark Twain -
If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.
Mark Twain
-
So there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and aint't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.
Mark Twain -
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain -
I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian's inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business-in either straight business or the questionable sort.
Mark Twain -
Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all - the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.
Mark Twain -
Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
Mark Twain -
I had now-not for the first time, nor the thousandth-trampled upon an old and wise and stern maxim of mine, to wit: 'Supposing is good, but finding out is better.'
Mark Twain
-
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
Mark Twain -
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Mark Twain -
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.
Mark Twain -
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise and I know they are dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me now I would go to that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot and kill him.
Mark Twain -
Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
Mark Twain -
I never smoke to excess - that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time.
Mark Twain
-
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Mark Twain -
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.
Mark Twain -
A Jewish beggar is not impossible, perhaps; such a thing may exist, but there are few men that can say they have seen that spectacle.
Mark Twain -
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.'
Mark Twain -
Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs-the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest-you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.
Mark Twain -
I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.
Mark Twain
-
Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
Mark Twain -
No accident ever comes late; it always arrives precisely on time.
Mark Twain -
Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Mark Twain -
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.
Mark Twain