Mark Twain quotes:

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  • Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.

  • Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.

  • If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.

  • Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

  • The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

  • Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.

  • Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

  • It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

  • The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

  • Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

  • All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

  • There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one - keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.

  • Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

  • Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

  • Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

  • Don't let schooling interfere with your education.

  • Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

  • When in doubt tell the truth.

  • The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.

  • Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

  • The lack of money is the root of all evil.

  • I've never let my school interfere with my education.

  • Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.

  • Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.

  • Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

  • I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

  • The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

  • I never let schooling interfere with my education.

  • Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

  • We have the best government that money can buy.

  • It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

  • Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so.

  • Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.

  • 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.

  • Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

  • The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.

  • Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

  • Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

  • To refuse awards is another way of accepting them with more noise than is normal.

  • Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

  • When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

  • Buy land, they're not making it anymore.

  • What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.

  • There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.

  • It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us - dreamers and indolent... It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich - these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

  • No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

  • Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

  • But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

  • 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.

  • I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

  • Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

  • George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.

  • Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

  • Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.

  • The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

  • Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish.

  • It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.

  • A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

  • I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'

  • God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

  • In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.

  • In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

  • The educated Southerner has no use for an 'r', except at the beginning of a word.

  • Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

  • There are lies, damned lies and statistics.

  • Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

  • Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.

  • Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

  • Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

  • Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which, before their union, were not perceived to have any relation.

  • When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.

  • You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

  • Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

  • My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

  • Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

  • If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but deteriorate the cat.

  • Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.

  • As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.

  • All right, then, I'll go to hell.

  • I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.

  • Let us endeavor so to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

  • There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.

  • To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.

  • Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

  • Classic.' A book which people praise and don't read.

  • It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

  • Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

  • I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

  • Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

  • Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to.

  • I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

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

  • 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 can live for two months on a good compliment.

  • The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.

  • When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

  • The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

  • My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

  • Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

  • The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

  • God created war so that Americans would learn geography.

  • Humor is tragedy plus time.

  • The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Which is him?" The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday."

  • 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."

  • A hypocritical businessman, whose fortune had been the misfortune of many others, told Mark Twain piously, "Before I die I intend to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. I want to climb to the top of Mount Sinai and read the Ten Commandments aloud." "I have a better idea," suggested TwainWhy don't you stay right at home in Boston and keep them?"

  • Dance like no one's watching, live every day like it's your last and love like you've never been hurt. Mark Twain"

  • The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow, is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven's gates had swung open and exposed the throne. (Twain on seeing the Jungfrau.)"

  • ALL of Mark Twain's! Just go to his quote page - https://www.goodreads.com/author/quot..."

  • Mark Twain describes how his friend Ralph Keeler introduced him at the start of a lecture: " 'I don't know anything about this man. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn't been in the penitentiary, and the other is (after a pause, and almost sadly), I don't know why."

  • Mark Twain, cynical about so much else, has a particular reverence in the Holy Land for "sitting where a god has stood". What flabbergasted him was that his traveling companions would be in such a sanctified environment and winter what they saw according to other writers or their denominational background instead their own experience with the holy."

  • Love Mark Twain! Here is one from him:"Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint."Yep!Succinct! rest my case, why he is my all time favourite!"

  • The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about 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."

  • I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force."

  • So I learned then, that gold in it's native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and that only low-born metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that."

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