Mark Twain Quotes

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

~ Mark Twain

Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.

~ Mark Twain

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories— and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures.

~ Mark Twain

Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.

~ Mark Twain

Even the ugliest person's cellulite is more attractive than the most beautiful supermodel's lower intestine.' I'd put that on a T-shirt but probably Mark Twain already said it.

~ Jenny Lawson

This river is famed in atrocious song and verse; the most prevalent motif is one which attempts to make of the river an ersatz father figure. Actually, the Mississippi River is a treacherous and sinister body of water whose eddies and currents yearly claim many lives. I have never known anyone who would even venture to stick his toe in its polluted waters, which seethe with sewage, industrial waste, and deadly insecticides. Even the fish are dying. Therefore, the Mississippi as Father-God-Moses-Daddy-Phallus-Pops is an altogether false motif began, I would imagine, by that dreary fraud, Mark Twain. This failure to make contact with reality is, however, characteristic of almost all of America’s “art.” Any connection between American art and American nature is purely coincidental, but this is only because the nation as a whole has no contact with reality. That is only one of the reasons why I have always been forced to exist on the fringes of its society, consigned to the Limbo reserved for this who do know reality when they see it.

~ John Kennedy Toole

No alien land in all the world has any deep strong charm for me but one, no other land could so longingly and so beseechingly haunt me, sleeping and waking, through half a lifetime, as that one has done. Other things leave me, but it abides me; other things change, but it remains the same. For me its balmy airs are always blowing, its summer seas flashing in the sun; the pulsing of it surfbeat is in my ear; I can see its garland crags, its leaping cascades, its plumy palms drowsing by the shore, its remote summits floating like islands above the cloud wrack; I can feel the woodland solitudes, I can hear the splash of its brooks; in my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago. -MARK TWAIN in an 1889 Dinner Speech at Delmonico's in New York to honor two baseball teams that had just returned from touring the Pacific, including Honolulu.

~ John Richard Stephens

Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.

~ Mark Twain

...why is my cat a Muse? the cat has the rare grace of never saying a word too much― Mark Twain ...that's why ...

~ John Geddes

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

~ Mark Twain

If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you can't learn any other way.--Mark Twain

~ Tony-Paul De Vissage

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

Loose and forbear!

~ Mark Twain

Frederick Douglass told in his Narrative how his condition as a slave became worse when his master underwent a religious conversion that allowed him to justify slavery as the punishment of the children of Ham. Mark Twain described his mother as a genuinely good person, whose soft heart pitied even Satan, but who had no doubt about the legitimacy of slavery, because in years of living in antebellum Missouri she had never heard any sermon opposing slavery, but only countless sermons preaching that slavery was God's will. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.

~ Steven Weinberg

Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.

~ Mark Twain

Being skilled in Catsism is like being a ninja only deadlier and not so silent. The only bad thing is the sickening grammar you have to use.

~ Will Advise

But that is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel.

~ Mark Twain

Looking' his last' upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing 'she' could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips.

~ Mark Twain

A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.

~ Elizabeth Wallace

It was a dreadful thing to see. Humans beings can be awful cruel to one another.

~ Mark Twain

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

~ Mark Twain

Some people scorn a cat and think it not an essential, but the Clemens tribe are not of these.

~ Mark Twain

Do you know who Samuel Langhorne Clemens is, Antonio?” Bessie asked.“No, chood I?” he said. “He is best known as Mark Twain, the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” she said.“I have herd of the story, but I hav not red the booc,” he said.“Well, you should read it,” she said. “It is excellent reading. An American classic. Mark Twain worked in Schoharie for a while,” she said.“Is that so?” he said.“Yes, he worked as a brakeman on the Schoharie railroad station on Depot Street the winter of 1879, three years after he wrote his famous book,” Bessie said.“Why would he do that, a famos author?” Antonio asked.“A self-published author, I should add.

~ Yasmin Tirado-Chiodini

It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.

~ Mark Twain

Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.

~ Mark Twain

You gwyne to have considerable trouble in yo' life, en considerable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you's gwyne to git well agin.

~ Mark Twain

The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.

~ Mark Twain