Mark Twain Quotes: 637 Wit, Wisdom, and Humor to Inspire and Entertain

Mark Twain: 637 quotes808 likes

Mark Twain Quotes

“It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.”

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. III
Following the Equator (1897)

“She makes me get up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to let any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for — well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat — I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell — everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it.”

Mark Twain book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Ch. 35

“Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all — the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.”

Mark Twain

Memorandum written on his deathbed
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

“There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 136

“Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If the Eiffel Tower were now representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.”

Mark Twain

Was the World Made for Man? (1903): also p. 106, What is man?: and other philosophical writings, Volume 19 of Works, 1993, Mark Twain, Paul Baender, University of California Press

“Definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

Mark Twain

Quoting or paraphrasing a Professor Winchester in "Disappearance of Literature" http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=TwaSpee.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=52&division=div1, speech at the Nineteenth Century Club, New York, 20 November 1900, in Mark Twain's Speeches (1910), ed. William Dean Howells, p. 194 http://books.google.com/books?id=7etXZ5Q17ngC&pg=PA194 Variant: A classic – something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

“I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 475

“France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.”

Mark Twain

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

“When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?”

Mark Twain

"Consistency", paper read at the Hartford Monday Evening Club on 5 December 1887. The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, p. 582 http://books.google.com/books?id=sujuHO_fvJgC&pg=PA582&dq=%22When+the+doctrine+of+allegiance%22 (First published in the 1923 edition of Mark Twain's Speeches, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, pp. 120-130, where it is incorrectly dated "following the Blaine-Cleveland campaign, 1884." (See Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals (1979), ed. Frederick Anderson, Vol. 3, p. 41, footnote 92 http://books.google.com/books?id=kMbeUm4pJwsC&pg=PA41) Many reprints repeat Paine's dating.)

“…why doesn't somebody write a tract on "How to Be a Christian and yet keep your Hands off of Other People's Things."”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 222

“Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!”

Mark Twain book The Innocents Abroad

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

“There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 135

“The best of us would rather be popular than right.”

Mark Twain

No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger (unpublished manuscript written 1902–1908)

“Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.”

Mark Twain

The Gorky Incident (1906)

“The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it -- they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization.”

Mark Twain

To the Person Sitting in Darkness http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/sitting.html (1901)

“A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.”

Mark Twain book Roughing It

Roughing It (published 1872)
Roughing It (1872)

“…a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute…”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 451

“Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him that I hadn't any.”

Mark Twain

"Taming the Bicycle" (1917)

“I have seen Chinamen abused and maltreated in all the mean, cowardly ways possible to the invention of a degraded nature, but I never saw a policeman interfere in the matter and I never saw a Chinaman righted in a court of justice for wrongs thus done him.”

Mark Twain

"The Treaty With China", article in The New York Tribune, 1868-08-04. Quoted in Mark Twain's Letters, volume ii, p. 239 https://books.google.com/books?id=EWvU21-vV8EC&pg=PA239&lpg=PA239&dq=%22I+have+seen+Chinamen+abused+and+maltreated+in+all+the+mean,+cowardly+ways+possible+to+the+invention+of+a+degraded+nature.%22&source=bl&ots=-MSeb52ibq&sig=7EJ2Hkgp58wiQNoBmWysiM5YcIQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjMxPKKvbTMAhUM4mMKHbICCt0Q6AEIHTAA#v=onepage&q=%22I%20have%20seen%20Chinamen%20abused%20and%20maltreated%20in%20all%20the%20mean%2C%20cowardly%20ways%20possible%20to%20the%20invention%20of%20a%20degraded%20nature.%22&f=false

“Wagner's music is better than it sounds.”

Mark Twain

Actually by Bill Nye, possibly confused due to Nye quoting Twain in More Tramps Abroad, 1897. (See also autobiography, vol. 1, p. 288.)
Misattributed

“…when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 127

“Truth is stranger than fiction — to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.”

Mark Twain book Following the Equator

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
Following the Equator (1897)

“The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not.”

Mark Twain book Following the Equator

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XLIX
Following the Equator (1897)

“There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.”

Mark Twain book The Mysterious Stranger

The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

“Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice. … I have touched upon this matter in a small book which I wrote a generation ago and which I have not published as yet — Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. When Stormfield arrived in heaven he … was told that … a shoemaker … was the most prodigious military genius the planet had ever produced.”

Mark Twain

The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1959 edition, edited by Charles Neider).

“The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.”

Mark Twain

How To Tell A Story (1895)

“He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty.”

Mark Twain

"Rev. Henry Ward Beecher's Farm" (1869), anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches http://books.google.com/books?id=UwcCAAAAQAAJ (1872)

“Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. By forever, I mean thirty years.”

Mark Twain

Mark Twain in eruption: hitherto unpublished pages about men and events, 1940, Mark Twain, Bernard Augustine De Voto, Harper & brothers. This appears to be the origin of the variant:
If you would have your work last forever, and by forever I mean fifty years, it must neither overtly preach nor overtly teach, but it must covertly preach and covertly teach.
Attributed to Twain by J. Michael Straczynski in The complete book of scriptwriting, 2002, Writer's Digest Books

“We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 18

“Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.”

Mark Twain

"A Mysterious Visit", Buffalo Express, 19 March 1870. Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old‎ http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ (1875)

“As I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious.”

Mark Twain

"English as She Is Taught", The Century, Vol. 33, No. 6, April 1887 http://books.google.com/books?id=EzGgAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA932. A slightly abridged version was reprinted as Introduction http://books.google.com/books?id=CxIuAAAAYAAJ&pg=PR11 to Caroline B. Le Row, English as She Is Taught: Genuine Answers to Some Examination Questions Asked in Our Public Schools (1901)

Mark Twain

"The Privilege of the Grave" (1905)

“It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred, and so, not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren of the knowledge.”

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

Ch 25 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-25.html A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

“We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.”

Mark Twain

Corn-Pone Opinions (1925)

“The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done — turn back and get at something profitable — no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.”

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

Ch. 22 http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-22.html A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.”

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

Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Ch. 13.

“I started out alone to seek adventures. You don't really have to seek them—that is nothing but a phrase—they come to you.”

Mark Twain

"Taming the Bicycle" (1917)

“His grammar is foolishly correct, offensively precise. It flaunts itself in the reader's face all along, and struts and smirks and shows off, and is in a dozen ways irritating and disagreeable. To be serious, I write good grammar myself, but not in that spirit, I am thankful to say. That is to say, my grammar is of a high order, though not at the top. Nobody's is. Perfect grammar—persistent, continuous, sustained—is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 120

“He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person.”

Mark Twain book The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg", ch. I, in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900)

“No accident ever comes late; it always arrives precisely on time.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 239

“Biographies are but clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

Mark Twain

Vol. I, p. 2
Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

“The funniest things are the forbidden.”

Mark Twain

"Notebook 18 (February–September 1879)" in Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Vol. 2 (1975), ed. Frederick Anderson, ISBN 0520025423, p. 304

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Mark Twain

Often attributed to Twain, but he said it was attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and this itself is probably a misattribution: see Lies, damned lies, and statistics and Leonard H. Courtney. Twain did, however, popularize this saying in the United States. His attribution is in the following passage from Twain's Autobiography (1924), Vol. I, p. 246 (apparently written in Florence in 1904) http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/lies.htm: Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics". Misattributed

“We are always anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.”

Mark Twain

upon being told he had a good head for business, p. 378
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010)

“There has never been a just one, never an honorable one — on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful — as usual — will shout for the war. The pulpit will — warily and cautiously — object — at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers — as earlier — but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation — pulpit and all — will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”

Mark Twain book The Mysterious Stranger

originally in The Chronicle of Satan (1905).
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

“I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it. And besides, I have lived with liars so long that I have lost the tune, & a fact jars upon me like a discord.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 435

“It's easy to quit smoking. I've done it hundreds of times ”

Mark Twain

“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.”