Mark Twain Quotes

Experience is an author’s most valuable asset, experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

~ Mark Twain

A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same dog he was before? No sir; he is das Hundes; put him in the Dative case & what is he? Why, he is dem Hund. Now you snatch him into the accusative case & how is it with him? Why he is den Hunden? ... Read moreBut suppose he happens to be twins & you have to pluralize him – what then? Why sir they’ll swap that twin dog around thro’ the four cases till he’ll think he’s an entire International Dog Show all in his own person. I don’t like dogs, but I wouldn’t treat a dog like that. I wouldn’t even treat a borrowed dog that way.

~ Mark Twain

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

~ Mark Twain

Loose and forbear!

~ Mark Twain

This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.

~ Mark Twain

I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.

~ Mark Twain

I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon, at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make [it] out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles. If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is; for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile. It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

~ Mark Twain

A woman's intuition is better than a man's. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.

~ Mark Twain

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

~ Mark Twain

Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

~ Mark Twain

That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.

~ 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

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice.

~ Mark Twain

Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.

~ Mark Twain

For a little while, hope made a show of reviving-not with any reason to back it, but only because it is its nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age and familiarity with failure.

~ Mark Twain

Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?

~ Mark Twain

It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

~ Mark Twain

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.

~ Mark Twain

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

~ Mark Twain

Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it.

~ Mark Twain

In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.

~ Mark Twain

Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980)

~ Mark Twain

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

~ Mark Twain

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.

~ Mark Twain

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

~ Mark Twain

It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells.

~ Mark Twain

If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.

~ Mark Twain

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

~ Mark Twain

Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.

~ Mark Twain

No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

~ Mark Twain

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.

~ Mark Twain

he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign.

~ Mark Twain

Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world

~ Mark Twain

You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel

~ Mark Twain

Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.

~ Mark Twain

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

~ Mark Twain

I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.

~ Mark Twain

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d druther not.

~ Mark Twain

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

~ Mark Twain

Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes—circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.

~ Mark Twain