Mark Twain Quotes

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Never do wrong when people are looking.

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

If you have to eat a frog, don’t look at it for too long.

I never could keep a promise. I do not blame myself for this weakness, because the fault must lie in my physical organization. It is likely that such a very liberal amount of space was given to the organ which enables me to make promises that the organ which should enable me to keep them was crowded out. But I grieve not. I like no half-way things. I had rather have one faculty nobly developed than two faculties of mere ordinary capacity.

Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: The one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.

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.

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

Just the omission of Jane Austen’s books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn’t a book in it.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one’s clothes.

Let us be grateful to Adam, our benefactor. He cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

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.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

Golf is a good walk spoiled.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.

The trouble ain’t that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain’t distributed right.