Mark Twain: Thing (page 4)

“I wanted to damage every man in the place, and every woman--and not in their bodies or in their estate, but in their vanity--the place where feeble and foolish people are most vulnerable. So I disguised myself and came back and studied you. You were easy game. You had an old and lofty reputation for honesty, and naturally you were proud of it — it was your treasure of treasures, the very apple of your eye. As soon as I found out that you carefully and vigilantly kept yourselves and your children out of temptation, I knew how to proceed. Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.”

Mark Twain book The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

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

Children , People , Game , Nature

“Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.”

Mark Twain book Following the Equator

Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXI
Following the Equator (1897)
Variant: Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

Love , Envy

“It [the press] has scoffed at religion till it has made scoffing popular. It has defended official criminals, on party pretexts, until it has created a United States Senate whose members are incapable of determining what crime against law and the dignity of their own body is—they are so morally blind—and it has made light of dishonesty till we have as a result a Congress which contracts to work for a certain sum and then deliberately steals additional wages out of the public pocket and is pained and surprised that anybody should worry about a little thing like that.”

Mark Twain

"License of the Press", an address before the Monday Evening Club, Hartford (1873)

Pain , Religion , Law , Light

“…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

People

“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

“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)

Life , Knowledge

“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)

Cats , Learning , Time , Horse

“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.

Death , Disease , Winter , Loyalty

“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 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)

Men , God , War , Secret

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

Mark Twain

Disappointment , Inspirational , Deep , Courageous

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

Mark Twain

“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

People , For Team

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

Mark Twain book Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

People , Secret , Age , World