Mark Twain: Man (page 3)

“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

“I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”

“Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time.”

“But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.”

“I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.”

“There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.”

“You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.”

“All creatures kill—there seems to be no exception; but of the whole list, man is the only one that kills for fun; he is the only one that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge.”

“In this connection I call to mind Genesis, chapter xlvii…the pathetic story of the years of plenty and the years of famine in Egypt, and how Joseph, with that opportunity, made a corner in broken hearts, and the crusts of the poor, and human liberty--a corner whereby he took a nation's money all away, to the last penny…then took the nation itself, buying it for bread, man by man, woman by woman, child by child, till all were slaves…and it was a disaster so crushing that its effects have not wholly disappeared from Egypt to-day… Was Joseph establishing a character for his race which would survive long in Egypt? and in time would his name come to be familiarly used to express that character--like Shylock's? It is hardly to be doubted. Let us remember that this was centuries before the Crucifixion.”

“A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.”

“The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds! You will excuse me from taking any more chances on those beds. The railroads are good enough for me.”