Mark Twain great quotes, a collection of the author’s best quotes and aphorisms on every aspects of life seen through his marvellous and witty sense of humor.
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.
Mark Twain
Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Mark Twain
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Mark Twain
A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.
Mark Twain
The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.
Mark Twain
A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
Mark Twain
A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.
Mark Twain
Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.
Mark Twain
A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.
Mark Twain
Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you opportunity to commit more.
Mark Twain
There is no such thing as ”the Queen’s English.” The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares!
Mark Twain
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
Mark Twain
Life is short. Break the rules. Forgive quickly. Kiss slowly. Love Truly. Laugh uncontrollably. Never regret anything that makes you smile.
Mark Twain
The two most important days of your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Mark Twain
Give every day a chance to become the most beautiful day in your life.
Mark Twain
The most permanent lessons in morals are those which come not of book teaching but of experience.
Mark Twain
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn no other way.
Mark Twain
I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.
Mark Twain
Action speaks louder than words, but not nearly as often.
Mark Twain
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. The man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Mark Twain
A classic: something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
Mark Twain
Put all your eggs in the one basket and – Watch That Basket.
Mark Twain
To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man’s character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
Mark Twain
There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me – I always feel that they have not said enough.
Mark Twain
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain
War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
Mark Twain
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Mark Twain
Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.
Mark Twain
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Mark Twain
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Mark Twain
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Mark Twain
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
Mark Twain
The very ink in which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Mark Twain
True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.
Mark Twain
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Mark Twain
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Mark Twain
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.
Mark Twain
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.
Mark Twain
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
Mark Twain
India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
Mark Twain
We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.
Mark Twain
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
Mark Twain
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
Mark Twain
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Mark Twain
It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
Mark Twain
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.
Mark Twain
My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.
Mark Twain
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Mark Twain
When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
Mark Twain
I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the “lower animals” (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.
Mark Twain
What’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
Mark Twain
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Mark Twain
Government is merely a servant – merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
Mark Twain
All kings is mostly rapscallions.
Mark Twain
To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.
Mark Twain
In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
Mark Twain
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
Mark Twain
Do not put off till tomorrow what can be put off till day-after-tomorrow just as well.
Mark Twain
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
Mark Twain
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Mark Twain
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing the matter with this, except that it ain’t so.
Mark Twain
The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
Mark Twain
The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.
Mark Twain
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Mark Twain
The holy passion of friendship is so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring in nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Mark Twain
Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
Mark Twain
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
Mark Twain
Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Mark Twain
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Mark Twain
After a few months’ acquaintance with European “coffee,” one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.
Mark Twain
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have someone to divide it with.
Mark Twain
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
Mark Twain
It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.
Mark Twain
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.
Mark Twain
There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Mark Twain
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
Mark Twain
When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.
Mark Twain
What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.
Mark Twain
Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy.
Mark Twain
The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
Mark Twain
What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows – it must grow; nothing can prevent it.
Mark Twain
I always did hate for anyone to know what my plans or hopes or prospects were – for, if I kept people in ignorance in these matters, no one could be disappointed but myself, if they were not realized.
Mark Twain
Men are easily dealt with – but when you get the women started, you are in for it, you know.
Mark Twain
We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half.
Mark Twain
Who would find out that I am a natural fool if I kept always cool and never let nature come to the surface? Nobody.
Mark Twain
Ah, well, I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God’s fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.
Mark Twain
I would rather have my ignorance than another man’s knowledge, because I have got so much more of it.
Mark Twain
My interest in my work dies a sudden and violent death when the work is done.
Mark Twain
I am as prompt as a clock, if I only know the day a thing is wanted – otherwise I am a natural procrastinaturalist.
Mark Twain
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
Mark Twain
Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.
Mark Twain
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
Mark Twain
Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.
Mark Twain
Human nature is the same everywhere; it deifies success, it has nothing but scorn for defeat.
Mark Twain
Patriotism is merely a religion – love of country, worship of country, devotion to the country’s flag and honor and welfare.
Mark Twain
Low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can’t support the play by itself.
Mark Twain
In truth I care little about any party’s politics – the man behind it is the important thing.
Mark Twain
I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can’t be made to do it in any possible way.
Mark Twain
I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.
Mark Twain
The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.
Mark Twain
In my experience, previously counted chickens never do hatch.
Mark Twain
God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.
Mark Twain
Drag your thoughts away from your troubles – by the ears, by the heels, or any other way, so you manage it.
Mark Twain
Lord, what an organ is human speech when it is played by a master!
Mark Twain
Unexpected money is a delight. The same sum is a bitterness when you expected more.
Mark Twain
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.
Mark Twain
There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
Mark Twain
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.
Mark Twain
I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.
Mark Twain
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.
Mark Twain
To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.
Mark Twain
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
Mark Twain
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
Mark Twain
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
Mark Twain
Heaven for climate, Hell for society.
Mark Twain
A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.
Mark Twain
I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
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
H’aint we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?
Mark Twain
Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts?… Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity.
Mark Twain
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.
Mark Twain
You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.
Mark Twain
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
Mark Twain
Virtue never has been as respectable as money.
Mark Twain
Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
Mark Twain
A man cannot be made comfortable without his own approval.
Mark Twain
The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.
Mark Twain
There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
Mark Twain
If you can’t get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.
Mark Twain
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
Mark Twain
The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.
Mark Twain
On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there’s any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.
Mark Twain
All say, How hard it is that we have to die – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
Mark Twain
Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Mark Twain
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Mark Twain
There is nothing so annoying as a good example!!
Mark Twain
The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won’t sit upon a cold stove lid, either.
Mark Twain
Familiarity breeds contempt; and children.
Mark Twain
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one: keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
Mark Twain
Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
Mark Twain
Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.
Mark Twain
If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.
Mark Twain
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
Mark Twain
When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Mark Twain
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
Mark Twain
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people but if we tried to shut up the insane we would run out of building materials.
Mark Twain
Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.
Mark Twain
All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they’re a mighty ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised.
Mark Twain
The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain’t so.
Mark Twain
Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.
Mark Twain
One of the striking differences between a cat and a lie is that the cat has only nine lives.
Mark Twain
Be good and you will be lonely.
Mark Twain
Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: The one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
Mark Twain
The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.
Mark Twain
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Mark Twain
Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it.
Mark Twain
Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.
Mark Twain
Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
Mark Twain
The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Mark Twain
The miracle, or the power, that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application, and perseverance under the prompting of a brave, determined spirit.
Mark Twain
By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.
Mark Twain
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
Mark Twain
I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
Mark Twain
When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.
Mark Twain
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Mark Twain
I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.
Mark Twain
The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.
Mark Twain
If you have nothing to say, say nothing.
Mark Twain
There’s always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.
Mark Twain
I don’t know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.
Mark Twain
Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.
Mark Twain
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist’s custom.
Mark Twain
I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
Mark Twain
Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
Mark Twain
I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.
Mark Twain
A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be lead by the nose.
Mark Twain
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
Mark Twain
Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the “blessing” of idleness and won for us the “curse” of labor.
Mark Twain
Write without pay until somebody offers to pay you. If nobody offers within three years, sawing wood is what you were intended for.
Mark Twain
It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.
Mark Twain
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