Mark Twain Quotes

“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.”

“Canadian girls are so pretty it's a relief now and then to see a plain one.”

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”

“In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night.”

“Suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind - your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work.”

“We do not get ice-cream every where, and so, when we do, we are apt to dissipate to excess.”

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

“When everyone is looking for gold, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.”

“When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder.”

“An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.”

“He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.”

“If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.”

“A little lie can travel half way 'round the world while Truth is still lacing up her boots.”

“In other localities certain places in the streams are much better than others, but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere.”

“Eight grown Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone-if still alive.”

“Chastity - you can carry it too far.”

“The trouble with most of us is that we know too much that ain't so.”

“My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.”

“Ignorance is not, not knowing something. It is knowing what isn't so.”

“Two days overdue, THE WORLD'S WORK has not reached me. Pray make a note of this. I would rather not have to resort to violence.”

“Travel is fatal to bigotry.”

“Sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get achance, because if you don't want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot. I never see papa when he didn't want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.”

“A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.”

“Golf is a good walk spoiled.”

“To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the on-looking world consent to it is finer.”