Mark Twain: Trending quotes (page 3)

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

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”

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

“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.”

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

“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!”

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

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

“In God We Trust.”

“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.”

“A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.”

“The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.”

“Always tell the truth. That way, you don't have to remember what you said.”

“To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.”

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”

“The ancients stole all our great ideas.”

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

“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.”

“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.”