Mark Twain Quotes

You can't pray a lie--I found that out.

~ Mark Twain

A God who could make good children as easily a 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 is 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 his poor abused slave to worship him!

~ Mark Twain

When we set about accounting for a Napoleon or a Shakespeare or a Raphael or a Wagner or an Edison or other extraordinary person, we understand that the measure of his talent will not explain the whole result, nor even the largest part of it; no, it is the atmosphere in which the talent was cradled that explains; it is the training it received while it grew, the nurture it got from reading, study, example, the encouragement it gathered from self-recognition and recognition from the outside at each stage of its development: when we know all these details, then we know why the man was ready when his opportunity came.

~ Mark Twain

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

~ Mark Twain

Stars and shadows ain't good to see by.

~ Mark Twain

Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

~ Mark Twain

Warm summer sun, shine brightly here, Warm Southern wind, blow softly here, Green sod above, lie light, lie light, Good night, dear heart; good night, good night.

~ Mark Twain

Well, everybody does it that way, Huck.Tom, I am not everybody.

~ Mark Twain

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

~ Mark Twain

They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.

~ Mark Twain

Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward.

~ Mark Twain

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

~ Mark Twain

I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.

~ Mark Twain

We are so strangely made, the memories that could make us happy pass away, it is the memories that break our hearts that abide.

~ Mark Twain

For he did not seem to know any way to do a person a kindness but by killing him.

~ Mark Twain

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

~ Mark Twain

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

~ Mark Twain

We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can show off and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.

~ Mark Twain

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

~ Mark Twain

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.

~ Mark Twain

It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream - till you got a bite.A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next to bathe the bitten place with alcohol or brandy; and the next to resolve to keep out of the grass in the future. Then came an adjournment to the bedchamber and the pastime of writing up the day's journal with one hand and the destruction of mosquitoes with the other - a whole community of them at a slap. Then, observing an enemy approaching - a hairy tarantula on stilts - why not set the spittoon on him? It is done, and the projecting ends of his paws give a luminous idea of the magnitude of his reach. Then to bed and become a promenade for a centipede with forty-two legs on a side and every foot hot enough to burn a whole through a raw-hide. More soaking with alcohol, and a resolution to examine the bed before entering it, in future. Then wait, and suffer, till all the mosquitoes in the neighborhood have crawled in under the bar, then slip out quickly, shut them in and sleep peacefully on the floor till morning. Meantime, it is comforting to curse the tropics in occasional wakeful intervals.

~ Mark Twain

Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry.

~ Mark Twain

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.

~ Mark Twain

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.

~ Mark Twain

The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.

~ Mark Twain

Be good and you will be lonesome.

~ Mark Twain

If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once – you’ll see.

~ Mark Twain

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

~ Mark Twain

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

~ Mark Twain

He done his level best.Was he a mining on the flat..He done it with a zest..Was he a leading of the choir..He done his level best.If he'd a reg'lar task to do,He never took no rest..Or if 'twas off and on the same..He done his level best.If he was preachin' on his beat,He'd tramp from east to west,And north to south ..in cold and heat..He done his level best.He'd Yank a sinner outen (Hades),And land him with the blest;Then snatch a prayer'n waltz in again,And do his level best.He'd cuss and sing and howl and pray,And dance and drink and jest,He done his level best.Whate'er this man was sot to doHe done it with a zest;No matter what his contract was,He'd do his level best...

~ Mark Twain

The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.

~ Mark Twain

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two.

~ Mark Twain

Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet—no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.

~ Mark Twain

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

~ Mark Twain

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.

~ Mark Twain

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

~ Mark Twain

Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice!

~ Mark Twain

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

~ Mark Twain

I said it was a brutal thing.No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it.

~ Mark Twain

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

~ Mark Twain