Mark Twain

“The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.”

“Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.”

“There is nothing so annoying as having two people talking when you're busy interrupting.”

“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.”

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so. ”

“A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.”

“Hang the boy, can't I never learn anything? Ain't he played tricks on me enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can;t learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what's coming? He 'pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it's all down again and I can't hit him a lick. I ain't doing my duty by that boy, and that's the Lord's truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I'm a-laying up sin and suffering for the both of us, I know. He's full of the Old Scratch, but laws-a-me! he's my own dead sister's boy, poor thing, and I ain't got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart almost breaks. Well-a-well, man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says, and I reckon it's so. He'll play hooky this evening, and I'll just be obleeged to make him work tomorrow, to punish him. It's mighty hard to make him work Saturdays, when all the boys is having holiday, but he hates work more than he hates anything else, and I've got to do some of my duty by him, or I'll be the ruination of the child.”

“We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.”

“Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”

“To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble.”

“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels.”

“But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.”

“Each time in fiction or in history I meet a well-defined personality I am personally interested in him, for we know each other already, because we met on the river.”

“Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.”

“I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel they have not said enough.”

“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?”

“I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it have gone and done it. So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that thing. That is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.”

“Stars and shadows ain't good to see by.”

“Strange! that you should not have suspected years ago--centuries, ages, eons, ago!--for you have existed, companionless, through all the eternities. Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane--like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell--mouths mercy and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!”

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

“That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.”

“Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.”

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

“Once my imagination persuaded me that the dying man gave me a reproachful look out of his shadowy eyes, and it seemed to me that I could rather he had stabbed me than done that. He muttered and mumbled like a dreamer in his sleep, about his wife and his child; and I thought about a new despair, "This thing that I have done does not end with him; it falls upon them too and they never did me any harm... The man was not in uniform, and was not armed. He was a stranger in the country; that was all we ever found out about him. The thought of him got to preying upon me every night; I could not get rid of it. I could not drive it away, the taking of that unoffending life seemed such a wanton thing. And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just that -- the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was spoiled. It seemed to me I was not rightly equipped for this awful business; that war was intended for men, and I for a child's nurse.”

“Love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes-none knows whence-and cannot explain itself.”

“Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.”

“Un clásico es un libro que todos alaban y nadie lee”

“If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape? No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love.”

“The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.”

“I am quite sure ... I have no race prejudice, and I think I have no color prejudices, nor caste prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All I care to know is that a man is a human being—this is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.”

“If there is no smoking in heaven, I'm not interested”

“Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.”

“Emperors, kings, artisians, peasens, big people---at the bottom we are all alike and all the same; all just alike on the inside, and when our clothes are off, nobody can tell which of us is which.”

“It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.”

“Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

“If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.”

“One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.”

“I can last two months on a good compliment.”

“Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.”

“I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.”

“Switzerland would me a mighty big place if it were ironed flat.”

“It's not as bad as it sounds.”

“Aufgrund meiner philologischen Studien bin ich überzeugt, dass ein begabter Mensch Englisch (außer Schreibung und Aussprache) in dreißig Stunden, Französisch in dreißig Tagen und Deutsch in dreißig Jahren lernen kann. Es liegt daher auf der Hand, dass die letztgenannte Sprache zurechtgestutzt und repariert werden sollte. Falls sie so bleibt wie sie ist, sollte sie sanft und ehrerbietig zu den toten Sprachen gestellt werden, denn nur die Toten haben genügend Zeit, sie zu lernen.”

“Ich würde von jedermann, ob hoch oder niedrig, verlangen, dass er mir einfach und geradezu mit dem kommt, was er mir erzählen will, oder aber seine Geschichte zusammenrollt und sich darauf setzt und Ruhe gibt. Übertretungen dieses Gesetzes müssten mit dem Tode bestraft werden.”

“Ah, if he could only die temporarily!”

“Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved. ”

“Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.”

“There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory. The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the deity nor his son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled.”

“Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin what what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.”

“when we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.”