Mark Twain Quotes
-
The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.
-
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.
-
Virtue never has been as respectable as money.
-
I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little-not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.
-
There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life-life's 'experiences'-are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never know one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side.
-
Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
-
It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
-
Better a broken promise than none at all.
-
In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.
-
There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought - a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.
-
Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.
-
What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.
-
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.
-
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
-
I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it. And besides, I have lived with liars so long that I have lost the tune, & a fact jars upon me like a discord.
-
Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.
-
The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
-
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.