Quotes by Mark Twain

42 quotes     Show as list

It is easier to stay out than get out.
Wagner's music is better than it sounds.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
Believe nothing you hear, and only half of what you see.
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.
Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.
Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. 
There are only two types of speakers in the world, the nervous and the liar.
It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
CLASSIC: In literature, a book that everybody wants to have read but nobody wants to read.
It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
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 a man.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
42 quotes     Show as list