After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.
Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.
Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.
There isn’t time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir…mighty scarce.
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”]
It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.
If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.
Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous andshallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said ‘Faith is believing what youknow ain’t so’.
It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.
If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.
Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.
I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.
The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
I have lived a long life and had many troubles, most of which never happened
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
The Bible has noble poetry in it… and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
Herodotus says, “Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.
When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.
If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won’t sit on a hot stove again. That cat won’t sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don’t like stoves.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.
Yes – en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’ want no mo’.
I’ll not go where there is any of that sort of thing going on, again. It’s the sure way, and the only sure way;
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
Yes, King Edward VI lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them worthily.
Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.
The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.
One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.
Which is him?” The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.
The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world’s daytime dictionaries.
A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt.
That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved.
Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.
Ah, heavens and earth, friend, if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor that you could to-day.
Never let your education interfere with your learning.
What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity – another man’s, I mean.
Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
I persuaded him to throw the dirk away and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
′Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read.
If books are not good company, where shall I find it?
Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
I don’t like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell, you see, I have friends in both places.
The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying ‘flee at once – all is discovered.’ They all left town immediately.
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
Life itself is only a vision, a dream.””Nothing exists; all is a dream. God–man–the world–the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars–a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space–and you!
It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.
That’s the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don’t care, individuals do.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.
Summer is the time when it is too hot to do the job that it was too cold to do last winter.
It is not that I believe that there are too many idiots in this world, just that lightning isn’t distributed right.
Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.
In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.
Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals.
Kill the women? No – nobody ever saw anything in the books like that. You fetch them to the cave, and you’re always as polite as pie to them; and by-and-by they fall in love with you and never want to go home any more.
One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a women is, until after considerable acquaintance with her.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORperG.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.
Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.
Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.
Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn’t.
Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.
You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!
You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there.
To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
Children have but little charity for each other’s defects.
It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable.
A consciously exaggerated compliment is an offense.
You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.
The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to pr
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Warm summer sun, shine brightly here, Warm Southern wind, blow softly here, Green sod above, lie light, lie light, Good night, dear heart; good night, good night.
Well, everybody does it that way, Huck.””Tom, I am not everybody.
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever.
Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward.
During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business
Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.
For he did not seem to know any way to do a person a kindness but by killing him.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.
Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry.
I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.
The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.
If you think it ain’t dismal and lonesome out in a fog that way, by yourself, in the night, you try it once – you’ll see.
The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.
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.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Tom’s whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it.
Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice!
If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.
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.
I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.
This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.
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.
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
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.
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.
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.
One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it;
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.
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,
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.
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.
There’s one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he’s crooked.
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.
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?
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.
I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.
Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.
It ain’t the parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.
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.
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.
You will be more disappointed in life by the things that you do not do than by the things that you do.
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
I haven’t a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
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.
If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.
The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.
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.
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Now he found out a new thing–namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done – these are traits of the human race at large.
Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world
You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel
Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.
If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.
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.
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.
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
Work like you don’t need the money. Dance like no one is watching. And love like you’ve never been hurt.
Like it! Yes—the way I’d like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won’t be rich, and I won’t live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I’ll stick to ’em, too.
But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
A home without a cat — and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat — may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
She said all a body would have to do there [Heaven] was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.
Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life.
I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
NOTICEPersons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORPer G.G.,Chief of Ordnance
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
But that is the way we are made: we don’t reason, where we feel; we just feel.
The darling mispronunciations of childhood! – dear me, there’s no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.
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.
There isn’t a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror.
Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let’s go on trying.
The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul.
Today the same thing over. I’ve got it up the tree again.
Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession.
The thing for us to do is just to do our duty, and not worry about whether anybody sees us do it or not.
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.
She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die.
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.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today — all without seeing him. It is a long time to be alone; still, it is better to be alone that unwelcome. I had to have company — I was made for it, I think — so I made friends with the animals.
If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
It was a dreadful thing to see. Humans beings can be awful cruel to one another.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.
An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.- A Tramp Abroad
He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a consul at home.
Man is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn’t straight
He had had much experience of physicians, and said ‘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’.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way.
At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn’t own one is a curiosity.
Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.
When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an orgy.
It made one mad, for pleasure; and we could not take our eyes from him, and the looks that went out of our eyes came from our hearts, and their dumb speech was worship.
Yes, I am of old family, and not illiterate. I am a fossil.” “A which?” “Fossil. The first horses were fossils. They date back two million years.
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. ~Mark Twain, “The Innocents Abroad
The writing begins when you’ve finished. Only then do you know what you’re trying to say.
The time to being writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say.
Who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it?
The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn’t it be?–it is the same the angels breathe.
I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand.
Perfect grammar–persistent, continuous, sustained–is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits. Fanatics will never learn that, though it be written in letters of gold across the sky. It is the prohibition that makes anything precious
Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.
Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful.
Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.
While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.
Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.
To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such.
Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
The preacher who casts a vote for conscience’ sake, runs the risk of starving.
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.
The weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.
The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.
Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.
and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.
Jim said he believed it was spirits, but I says: no, spirits wouldn’t say “dern the dern fog”.
Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.
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.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened.
Drag your thoughts awayfrom your troubles…by the ears, by the heels,or any other way you can manage it.
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.
To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, “Our Country, right or wrong,” and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?
There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.
It’s considered good sportsmanship not to pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.
In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?
Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.
I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners.”Manners!” he said. “Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction.
Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.
I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.
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.
Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!” Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer
We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents.
Satan had been making admiring remarks about certain of the Creator’s sparkling industries — remarks which, being read between the lines, were sarcasms.
Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.
It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.
A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
Put all thine eggs in one basket and – watch that basket.
Fewer things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man but it would deteriorate the cat.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Everyone is a moon and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
He liked to like people therefore people liked him.
Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we’d all have frozen to death.
I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong and he said: “Yes: the little one does.”
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
Love seems the swiftest but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency – and a virtue and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency – and a vice.
Courage is resistance to fear mastery of fear not absence of fear.
Courage is resistance to fear mastery of fear-not absence of fear.
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
We are chameleons and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blessed facility.
There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency and a virtue and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency and a vice.
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience – 4000 critics.
You can tell German wine from vinegar … by the label.
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
The human race is a race of cowards and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority for any town?
The fragrance of the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
To be satisfied with what one has that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount that man isn’t rich.
Grief can take care of itself but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Good friends good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly everybody will side with you when you are in the right.
There ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
From his cradle to the grave a man never does a single thing which has any first and foremost object save one-to secure peace of mind spiritual comfort for himself.
Habit is habit and not to be thrown out of the window by any man but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
Have a place for everything and keep the things somewheres else. That is not advice it is merely custom.
Good friends good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
To get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Happiness is a Swedish sunset it is there for all but most of us look the other way and lose it.
We may not pay Satan reverence for that would be indiscreet but we can at least respect his talents.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up.
Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have the man looked honest enough.
It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
Lord save us all from … a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Fewer things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
It takes your enemy and your friend working together to hurt you to the heart the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man – the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
It isn’t so astonishing the number of things that I can remember as the number of things I can remember that aren’t so.
Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.
In his private heart no man much respects himself.
Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman.
In statesmanship get formalities right never mind about the moralities.
It is a wise child that knows its own father and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.
When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
Richard Wagner a musician who wrote music which is better than it sounds.
Make it a point to do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
What a good thing Adam had – when he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.
Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong which course is patriotic and which isn’t. You cannot shirk this and be a man.
The Creator made Italy with designs by Michelangelo.
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
In prayer we call ourselves ‘worms of the dust’ but it is only on a sort of tacit understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par.
In certain trying circumstances urgent circumstances desperate circumstances profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie and He knowed it. You can’t pray a lie-I found that out.
We are chameleons and our partialities and prejudices change places with an easy and blessed facility.
I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead Spenser is dead so is Milton so is Shakespeare and I’m not feeling so well myself.
Get your facts first and then you can distort ’em as much as you please.
Heaven goes by favor if it went by merit you would stay out and your dog would go in.
It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me it’s the parts that I do understand.
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 we remember that we are all mad the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
The pause – that impressive silence that eloquent silence that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words howsoever felicitous could accomplish it.
There are several good protections against temptation but the surest is cowardice.
Adam was the only man who when he said a good thing knew that nobody had said it before him.
That kind of so-called housekeeping where they have six Bibles and no cork-screw.
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Travel is fatal to prejudice bigotry and narrow-mindedness.
There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land again after a cheerful careless voyage.
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.
I am opposed to millionaires but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
I wish to become rich so that I can instruct the people and glorify honest poverty a little like those kind-hearted fat benevolent people do.
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation.
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
In certain trying circumstances urgent circumstances desperate circumstances profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles but most of them never happened.
I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.
When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
When I was younger I could remember anything whether it had happened or not.
Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.
T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.
T[he rules of writing] require that the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.
Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.
Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow there is no humor in Heaven.
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Words are only painted fire a look is the fire itself.
It’s good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.
In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.
The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one – keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it’s your job to eat two frogs, it’s best to eat the biggest one first.
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
India has 2,000,000 gods and worships them all. In religion, all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.
Loyalty to the Nation all the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.
I never smoke to excess – that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time.
The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.
Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.
Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
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 rather not.
The Christian’s Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.
Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.
I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.
Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.
Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.
Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
All generalizations are false, including this one.
Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.
Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.
Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.
Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.
I never let schooling interfere with my education.
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any.
The finest clothing made is a person’s own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.