Mark Twain

“Wilson stopped and stood silent. Inattention dies a quick and sure death when a speaker does that.”

“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”

“One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin.”

“There are two kinds of patriotism -- monarchical patriotism and republican patriotism. In the one case the government and the king may rightfully furnish you their notions of patriotism; in the other, neither the government nor the entire nation is privileged to dictate to any individual what the form of his patriotism shall be. The gospel of the monarchical patriotism is: "The King can do no wrong." We have adopted it with all its servility, with an unimportant change in the wording: "Our country, right or wrong!" We have thrown away the most valuable asset we had:-- the individual's right to oppose both flag and country when he (just he, by himself) believed them to be in the wrong. We have thrown it away; and with it all that was really respectable about that grotesque and laughable word, Patriotism.”

“To me [Edgar Allan Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.”

“Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity.”

“The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.”

“Necessity is the mother of taking chances.”

“Drag your thoughts awayfrom your troubles...by the ears, by the heels,or any other way you can manage it.”

“Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot; and there ain't any real difference between triplets and a insurrection.- The Babies speech 1879”

“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”

“There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.”

“Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.”

“April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four..”

“Cave is a good word.... The memory of a cave I used to know was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its fleeting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations....”

“The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”

“After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.”

“All I care to know about a man is that he is a human being... he can't be any worse.”

“I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.”

“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.”

“Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.”

“A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.”

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”

“The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.”

“The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.”

“It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”

“I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.”

“I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.”

“People talk about beautiful relationships between two persons of the same sex. What is the best of that sort as compared with the friendship of man and wife where the best impulses and highest ideals of both are the same? There is no place for comparison between the two friendships; the one is earthly, the other divine.”

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”

“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer."[Mark Twain, a Biography]”

“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.”

“All right, then, I'll go to hell.”

“The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.from "Disappearance of Literature”

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”

“The 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.”

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. ”

“Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!”

“No narrative that tells the facts of a man's life in the man's own words can be uninteresting.”

“There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous andshallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what youknow ain't so'.”

“The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it...”

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”

“I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.”

“Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.”

“The wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling.”

“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”

“Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.”