Mark Twain: Trending quotes (page 10)

“Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs—the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest—you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.”

Mark Twain

About Margaret Deland's book John Ward, Preacher
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

Feeling , Failure , Hell , Strong

“…it seems to be a law of the human constitution that those that deserve shall not have, and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having. It is a sufficiently crazy arrangement, it seems to me.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 245

Law

“Jesus died to save men — a small thing for an immortal to do, & didn't save many, anyway; but if he had been damned for the race that would have been act of a size proper to a god, & would have saved the whole race. However, why should anybody want to save the human race, or damn it either? Does God want its society? Does Satan?”

Mark Twain

Notebook #42

Men , God

“Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.”

Mark Twain

Max Müller, India: What Can India Teach Us? (1883), p. 15 http://books.google.com/books?id=pIVDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA15&dq=%22most+valuable+and+most+instructive+materials+in+the+history+of+man+are+treasured+up+in+India%22
Misattributed

History

“It is a pity we can't escape from life when we are young.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 120

Life

“Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 442

“I think the President is clearly insane in several ways, and insanest upon war and its supreme glories. I think he longs for a big war wherein he can spectacularly perform as chief general and chief admiral, and go down in history as the only monarch of modern times that has served both offices at the same time.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 173, of Theodore Roosevelt

War , Way , History , Thinking

“When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 4

Life , World , Gauge , Personality

“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Ch. 22

“The late Bill Nye once said "I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds."”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 288

Music

“God's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.”

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

God

“Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 2

“Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.”

Mark Twain book The Innocents Abroad

Source: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Ch. 27

“I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian's inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business--in either straight business or the questionable sort.”

Mark Twain book Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

Hostility , Question , Business

“If she were drowning I would not look—but I would not pull her out. I would not be a party to that last and meanest unkindness, treachery to a would-be suicide. My sympathies have been with the suicides for many, many years. I am always glad when the suicide succeeds in his undertaking. I always feel a genuine pain in my heart, a genuine grief, a genuine pity, when some scoundrel stays the suicide's hand and compels him to continue his life.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), pp. 45–46

Life , Pain , Feeling , Suicide

“Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel.”

Mark Twain

"The Late Benjamin Franklin", The Galaxy, Vol. 10, No. 1, July 1870 http://books.google.com/books?id=2TIZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA139. Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old‎ http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ (1875)

Idea , Country

“…[H]eaven for climate, Hell for society.”

Mark Twain

Speech to the Acorn Society (1901)
also given as: "Heaven for climate, Hell for companionship." (unsourced)

Hell

“Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him--his brain--have made that tool singularly competent…”

Mark Twain book Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

Age , Law

“The 'bus is English. When that is said, all is said. As a rule, any English thing is nineteen times as strong and twenty-three times as heavy as it needs to be. The 'bus fills these requirements.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 111