Mark Twain Quotes

“Too much is just enough.”

“I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.”

“Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.”

“Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch.”

“Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.”

“My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest.”

“It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell.”

“I never did a thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise that I didn't repent of within twenty-four hours.”

“Children and fools always speak the truth”

“A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.”

“The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.”

“That reminds me to remark, in passing, that the very first official thing I did, in my administration-and it was on the first day of it, too-was to start a patent office; for I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn't travel any way but sideways or backways.”

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

“[N]o 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.”

“I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!”

“On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.”

“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.”

“A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.”

“By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.”

“Children have but little charity for one another's defects”

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

“A gentleman is a man who can play the banjo, but doesn't.”

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that but the really great make you feel that you too can become great. When you are seeking to bring big plans to fruition it is important with whom you regularly associate. Hang out with friends who are like-minded and who are also designing purpose-filled lives. Similarly be that kind of a friend for your friends.”

“By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.”

“If all men were rich, all men would be poor.”