Mark Twain: Trending quotes

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“Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.”

Mark Twain

“Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”

Mark Twain

“If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Notebook entry, January or February 1894, Mark Twain&#x27;s Notebook, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (1935), p. 240 http://books.google.com/books?id=DjBVlb7cBSIC&amp;pg=PA240 <br class="br">Variant: If you tell the truth you do not need a good memory! <br class="br">Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“Of all the creatures that were made he [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one — the solitary one — that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices — the most hateful…He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain…Also — in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.”

Mark Twain

Vol. II, p. 7
Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

“If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.”

Mark Twain

Source: Notebook

“The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. ... How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiographical dictation, 2 December 1906. Published in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2 (University of California Press, 2013)

“Don't believe the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

Mark Twain

Misattributed <br class="br">Source: Often attributed to Twain, but sourced to Robert J. Burdette, Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/06/world-owes/

“The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.”

Mark Twain

Autobiographical Dictation (1906)

“In God We Trust.”

Mark Twain

It is the choicest compliment that has ever been paid us, and the most gratifying to our feelings. It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased: it always sounds well — In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true. And in a measure it is true — half the nation trusts in Him. That half has decided it.
Source: Mark Twain's Notebook (1935), p. 394

“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.”

Mark Twain

“The ancients stole all our great ideas.”

Mark Twain

Attested at least in 1780 https://books.google.ru/books?id=nUpWAAAAYAAJ&amp;q=Ancients&amp;pg=PA32 (by John Hope):<br><br>Now, the Devil confound those Ancients, for they have stolen all my good thoughts from me! <br class="br">Misattributed

“Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.”

Mark Twain

https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/07/19/heaven-for-climate/

“Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 16

“Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.”

Mark Twain

&quot;The Chronicle of Young Satan&quot; (ca. 1897–1900, unfinished), published posthumously in Mark Twain&#x27;s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (1969), ed. William Merriam Gibson ( pp. 165–166 http://books.google.com/books?id=LDvA2xcYZKcC&amp;pg=PA165 in the 2005 paperback printing, ISBN 0520246950)