Mark Twain citations

Page 11

“Chaque fois que vous constatez que vous êtes du côté de la majorité, il est temps de procéder à une réforme.”

“Si vous dites la vérité, vous n'avez à vous souvenir de rien.”

“La race humaine ne possède qu'une seule arme vraiment efficace : le rire.”

“Le problème n'est pas de mourir pour un ami, mais de trouver un ami qui vaille la peine de mourir pour lui.”

“Ne dites jamais la vérité à ceux qui n'en sont pas dignes.”

“On a que le temps pour aimer et pas un instant de plus.”

“Il n'y a pas différents degrés de vanité, il y a seulement différents degrés de capacité à la dissimuler.”

“Toute école, toute université, a deux grandes fonctions : accorder, et dissimuler, des connaissances précieuses.”

“La vérité est la chose la plus précieuse que nous avons. Il nous faut l'économiser.”

“Les hommes ont plus de compassion/noblesse/magnanimité/générosité que Dieu; car les hommes pardonnent les morts, mais Dieu ne le fait pas.”

“Le problème n'est pas que les sots soient trop nombreux, mais que les éclairs de foudre soient mal distribués.”

“Ce qu'il manque à Dieu, ce sont des convictions, une certaine stabilité de caractère. Il devrait être presbytérien ou catholique ou quelque chose, mais pas essayer d'être tout à la fois.”

“Il n'y a eu qu'un chrétien. Ils l'ont attrapé et crucifié – tôt.”

“Dans vingt ans, vous serez plus déçus par les choses que vous n'avez pas faites que par celles que vous avez faites. Alors sortez des sentiers battus. Mettez les voiles. Explorez. Rêvez. Découvrez.”

“Le romancier qui écrit une histoire d’adulte sait exactement où et comment s’arrêter, c’est le plus souvent par un mariage. Quand il s’agit d’un enfant, il s’arrête où il peut.”

“Un pauvre garçon qui n’avait rien d’autre à proposer alla jusqu’à dire, avec une fierté manifeste à ce souvenir : « Eh bien, moi, une fois, Tom Sawyer m’a battu ! »”

“La charité nous force à tirer le rideau sur le reste de cette scène.”

“Beaucoup de petites choses furent agrandies par le bon type de publicité.”

“Les informations les plus intéressantes proviennent des enfants, car ils disent tout ce qu'ils savent et puis s'arrêtent.”

“Faites toujours ce qui est bien. Cela satisfera la moitié de l'humanité et étonnera l'autre.”

“Mais qui prie pour Satan? Qui, en dix-huit siècles, a eu un peu d'humanité pour prier pour le seul pécheur qui en avait le plus besoin?”

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

“How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.”

“He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.”

“Work like you don't need the money. Dance like no one is watching. And love like you've never been hurt.”

“Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”

“One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.”

“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.”

“I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.”

“I don't want no better book than what your face is.”

“It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips.”

“I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.”

“Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

“Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.”

“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.”

“It is higher and nobler to be kind.”

“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.”