Mark Twain Quotes

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637 Wit, Wisdom, and Humor to Inspire and Entertain

“It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.”

“Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.”

“Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”

“Love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes-none knows whence-and cannot explain itself.”

“If you must be indiscrete, be discrete in your indiscretion.”

“Well, everybody does it that way, Huck."
"Tom, I am not everybody.”

“Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.”

“When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart.”

“All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.”

“Necessity is the mother of taking chances.”

“You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can't forget. Those are your 'friends”

“You can't throw too much style into a miracle.”

“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”

“When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.”

“By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.”

“Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise”

“…I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.”

“October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.”

“Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.”

“If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.”

“Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”

“He says every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.”

“I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.”

“It’s not the good that die young, it’s the lucky.”

“Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million.”

“He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.”

“A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”

“Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome super-abundance of that sort of time which ismoney.”

“I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.”

“To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin.”

“Don't go around thinking the world owes you a living. It was here first.”

“In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man”

“If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.”

“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”

“One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.”

“What's your name?"
"Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer."
"That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?"
"Yes”

“To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.”

“I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.”

“Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.”

“Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.”

“We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and it's efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read”

“New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

“It's not as bad as it sounds.”

“Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity.”

“A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.”

“It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.”

“Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain.”

“If a person offends you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance, and hit him with a brick.”

“I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.”