Mark Twain citations

Page 12

“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?”

“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.”