Mark Twain

“Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.”

“The truth is, a person's memory has no more sense that his conscience, and no appreciation whatever of values and proportions.”

“FOR EVERY GRAIN OF SAND IN OUR WORLD, THERE ARE ONE MILLION STARS IN THE UNIVERSE.”

“I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.”

“I did not steal your paltry goods!”

“Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

“There’s no such thing as an uninteresting life, such a thing is an impossibility. Beneath the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy.”

“You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom's Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.”

“I am willing to be a literary thief if it has so been ordained; I am even willing to be caught robbing the ancient dead alongside of Hopkinson Smith, for he is my friend and a good fellow, and I think would be as honest as any one if he could do it without occasioning remark; but I am not willing to antedate his crimes by fifteen hundred years. I must ask you to knock off part of that.”

“To be great, truly great, you have to be the kind of person who makes the others around you great.”

“It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:'All right, then, I'll go to hell'- and tore it up.”

“Mrs Kerslake:" but if there is no chance of being offered a place at Oxford, surely-?"Simon Kerslake: "Thats not what i said Mother, I shall be an undergraduate at Oxford by the first day of term”

“They did not know it was impossible so they did it”

“Buy land, they're not making it anymore.”

“Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise”

“The Southern heart is too impulsive; Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger.- "The Spirit of Tennessee Journalism”

“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

“I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand.”

“We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way.”

“Man will do MANY things to get himself loved. Man will do ALL things to get himself envied.”

“You cannot trust your eyes, if your imagination is out of focus.”

“Ein Kuss ist eine Sache, für die man beide Hände braucht.”

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.”

“Lying is universal - we all do it. Therefore, 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.”

“făgăduiala de a nu face un lucru este calea cea mai sigură pentru a fi mereu ispitit să-l faci.”

“It was the cool gray dawn, and there was a delicious sense of repose and peace in the deep pervading calm and silence of the woods. Not a leaf stirred; not a sound obtruded upon great Nature's meditation [...] Gradually the cool dim gray of the morning whitened, and as gradually sounds multiplied and life manifested itself. The marvel of Nature shaking off sleep and going to work unfolded itself to the musing boy [...] All Nature was wide awake and stirring, now; long lances of sunlight pierced down through the dense foliage far and near, and a few butterflies came fluttering upon the scene.”

“Then at once they reached and hovered upon the imminent verge of sleep - but an intruder came, now, that would not "down". It was conscience. They began to feel a vague fear that they had been doing wrong to run away; and next they thought of the stolen meat, and then the real torture came [...] 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. Then conscience granted a truce, and these curiously inconsistent pirates fell peacefully to sleep.”

“Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.”

“What got you into trouble?" says the baldhead to t'other chap."Well, I'd been selling an article to take the tartar off the teeth—and it does take it off, too, and generly the enamel along with it—”

“One poor chap, who had no other grandeur to offer, said with tolerably manifest pride in the remembrance: 'Well, Tom Sawyer he licked me once.' But that bid for glory was a failure. Most of the boys could say that, and so that cheapened the distinction too much." ~From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Scene where the neighbor boys were lamenting over Tom's apparent drowning.”

“Those who don't read good books have no advantage over those who can't.”

“The less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.”

“Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles”

“When a man's dog turns against him it is time for a wife to pack her trunk and go home to mama.”

“His hair was short and parted accurately in the middle, and he had all the look of an American person who would be likely to begin his signature with an initial, and spell his middle name out.”

“IN the morning we went up to the village and bought a wire rat-trap and fetched it down, and unstopped the best rat-hole, and in about an hour we had fifteen of the bulliest kind of ones; and then we took it and put it in a safe place under Aunt Sally's bed. But while we was gone for spiders little Thomas Franklin Benjamin Jefferson Elexander Phelps found it there, and opened the door of it to see if the rats would come out, and they did; and Aunt Sally she come in, and when we got back she was a- standing on top of the bed raising Cain, and the rats was doing what they could to keep off the dull times for her. So she took and dusted us both with the hickry, and we was as much as two hours catching another fifteen or sixteen, drat that meddlesome cub, and they warn't the likeliest, nuther, because the first haul was the pick of the flock. I never see a likelier lot of rats than what that first haul was.”

“All right, then, I'll go to hell' -and tore it up.It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and I said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn't. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”

“The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.”

“It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense”

“When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum.”

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

“Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene”

“If God had meant for us to be naked, we'd have been born that way.”

“Mark Twain, cynical about so much else, has a particular reverence in the Holy Land for "sitting where a god has stood". What flabbergasted him was that his traveling companions would be in such a sanctified environment and winter what they saw according to other writers or their denominational background instead their own experience with the holy.”

“Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed – because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays.”

“The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco”

“Health is a habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.”

“Descoperise fără să ştie că pentru a face pe om să dorească un lucru, fie că-i bărbat în toată firea, fie că-i băieţaş, trebuie să-i înfăţişezi acel lucru ca greu de obţinut.”

“Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying.”

“But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason.”