Mark Twain Quotes

There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Humor is mankind’s greatest blessing.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.

I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‚Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.‘

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.

Everything has its limit – iron ore cannot be educated into gold.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.

Grief can take care if itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

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.

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.

To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.

If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but deteriorate the cat.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial ‚we.‘

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.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

I never let schooling interfere with my education.

Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

All emotion is involuntary when genuine.

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.