Mark Twain Quotes

“When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.”

“There are some few people I respect and admire, but I don't think much of the species.”

“...ignorant as the unborne babe! ignorant as unborn twins!”

“Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.”

“What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.”

“Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

“Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.”

“I have no liking for novels or stories - none in the world; and so, whenever I read one - which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book - my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valuless. Are you saying "You have written stories yourself." Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.”

“There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.”

“I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.”

“To stand still is to fall behind.”

“I am as prompt as a clock, if I only know the day a thing is wanted—otherwise I am a natural procrastinaturalist.”

“But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.”

“No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.”

“France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.”

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.”

“I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.”

“If all the fools in this world should die, lordly God how lonely I should be.”

“In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.”

“Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!" Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer”

“Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one.”

“it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence.”

“Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery.”

“The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.”

“There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.”