Mark Twain citations (660 citations, Page 16)

Variante: Dans vingt ans, vous serez plus déçu 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.

De motivation

“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.”

Mark Twain livre Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

“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 ! »”

Mark Twain livre Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

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

Mark Twain livre Les Aventures de Tom Sawyer

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Cette traduction est en attente de révision. Est-ce correct?

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

Mark Twain

Cette traduction est en attente de révision. Est-ce correct?

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

Mark Twain

enfants

Cette traduction est en attente de révision. Est-ce correct?

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

Mark Twain

Cette traduction est en attente de révision. Est-ce correct?

“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?”

Mark Twain

Mark Twain: Citations en anglais

“A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.”

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Mark Twain

Quoting a schoolchild in "English as She Is Taught"

“All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.”

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Mark Twain livre Roughing It

On the Book of Mormon, Roughing It (published 1872), pp. 58-59
Roughing It (1872)

“I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.”

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Mark Twain livre Concerning the Jews

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)
Variante: I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

“I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”

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Mark Twain livre The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865)

“It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make as good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.”

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Letter of acceptance of membership to Concord Free Trade Club (March 28, 1885): Mark Twain, his life and work: a biographical sketch (1892), William Montgomery Clemens, Clemens Pub. Co.

“I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo — that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture — great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast — for luncheon — for dinner — for tea — for supper — for between meals. I like a change, occasionally.”

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Mark Twain livre The Innocents Abroad

Source: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Ch. 27

“"In God We Trust." Now then, after that legend had remained there forty years or so, unchallenged and doing no harm to anybody, the President suddenly "threw a fit" the other day, as the popular expression goes, and ordered that remark to be removed from our coinage.
Mr. Carnegie granted that the matter was not of consequence, that a coin had just exactly the same value without the legend as with it, and he said he had no fault to find with Mr. Roosevelt's action but only with his expressed reasons for the act. The President had ordered the suppression of that motto because a coin carried the name of God into improper places, and this was a profanation of the Holy Name. Carnegie said the name of God is used to being carried into improper places everywhere and all the time, and that he thought the President's reasoning rather weak and poor.
I thought the same, and said, "But that is just like the President. If you will notice, he is very much in the habit of furnishing a poor reason for his acts while there is an excellent reason staring him in the face, which he overlooks. There was a good reason for removing that motto; there was, indeed, an unassailably good reason — in the fact that the motto stated a lie. If this nation has ever trusted in God, that time has gone by; for nearly half a century almost its entire trust has been in the Republican party and the dollar–mainly the dollar. I recognize that I am only making an assertion and furnishing no proof; I am sorry, but this is a habit of mine; sorry also that I am not alone in it; everybody seems to have this disease.
Take an instance: the removal of the motto fetched out a clamor from the pulpit; little groups and small conventions of clergymen gathered themselves together all over the country, and one of these little groups, consisting of twenty-two ministers, put up a prodigious assertion unbacked by any quoted statistics and passed it unanimously in the form of a resolution: the assertion, to wit, that this is a Christian country. Why, Carnegie, so is hell. Those clergymen know that, inasmuch as "Strait is the way and narrow is the gate, and few — few — are they that enter in thereat" has had the natural effect of making hell the only really prominent Christian community in any of the worlds; but we don't brag of this and certainly it is not proper to brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.”

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Mark Twain

Statements (c. December 1907), in Mark Twain In Eruption : Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men And Events (1940) edited by Bernard Augustine De Voto

“…in October 1866 I broke out as a lecturer, and from that day to this I have always been able to gain my living without doing any work; for the writing of books and magazine matter was always play, not work. I enjoyed it; it was merely billiards to me.”

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Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 245

“No doubt the great majority of them are in the cemetery long ago, and I suppose the rest of us will join them before long. Speaking for myself I am willing; in fact I believe I have been willing ever since I was eighteen years old; not urgent, but willing, merely willing.”

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Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 288

“Probable nor'east to sou'west winds, varying to the soutard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes with thunder and lightning.”

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Mark Twain

New England Weather, speech to the New England Society (December 22, 1876)

“…a professor in one of the great female colleges. That odious form is common, and I submit and use it, though it offends me as much as it would to say female brickbat or female snow-storm or female geography.”

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Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 273

“Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.”

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Mark Twain

p. 69 http://books.google.com/books?id=HXQKAQAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PA69 of Vol. II of The Complete and Authoritative Edition, 2013, University of California Press
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013)

“I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.”

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Mark Twain

American Claimant (1892)

“I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, "All right, then, I'll GO to hell."”

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Mark Twain livre Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 31

“But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.”

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Mark Twain

Letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore (February 7, 1907)

“Citizenship? We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last refuge of the scoundrel -- and I believe that he was right. I remember when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country.”

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Mark Twain

True Citizenship at the Children's Theater 1907

“These facts are all on the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is a good and orderly citizen. Summed up, they certify that he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crimes and brutal dispositions; that his family life is commendable; that he is not a burden upon public charities; that he is not a beggar; that in benevolence he is above the reach of competition. These are the very quintessentials of good citizenship.”

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Mark Twain livre Concerning the Jews

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

“Everybody yelled at him, and laughed at him, and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now, because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on."”

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Mark Twain livre Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 21

“The bicycle had what is called the 'wabbles', and had them very badly. In order to keep my position, a good many things were required of me, and in every instance the thing required was against nature. Against nature, but not against the laws of nature.”

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Mark Twain

"Taming the Bicycle" (1917)

“Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane—but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a man, it is evidence that you are a lunatic.”

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"A New Crime", first published as "The New Crime" in the Buffalo Express, 16 April 1870. Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old‎ http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ (1875).

“Not a single right is indestructible: a new might can at any time abolish it, hence, man possesses not a single permanent right.
God is Might (and He is shifty, malicious, and uncertain).”

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Mark Twain

Source: Mark Twain's Notebook (1935), p. 394.

“Persons who think there is no such thing as luck—good or bad—are entitled to their opinion, although I think they ought to be shot for it.”

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Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 380

“Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.”

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Mark Twain

Letter to Gertrude Natkin, 2 March 1906 http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/53b4cf90-7739-0132-f12c-58d385a7b928

“The 'bus is English. When that is said, all is said. As a rule, any English thing is nineteen times as strong and twenty-three times as heavy as it needs to be. The 'bus fills these requirements.”

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Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 111

“Ages of restriction to the one tool which the law was not able to take from him--his brain--have made that tool singularly competent…”

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Mark Twain livre Concerning the Jews

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

“…[H]eaven for climate, Hell for society.”

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Mark Twain

Speech to the Acorn Society (1901)
also given as: "Heaven for climate, Hell for companionship." (unsourced)

“Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son. It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up. No; the simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel.”

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Mark Twain

"The Late Benjamin Franklin", The Galaxy, Vol. 10, No. 1, July 1870 http://books.google.com/books?id=2TIZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA139. Anthologized in Mark Twain's Sketches, New and Old‎ http://books.google.com/books?id=5LcIAAAAQAAJ (1875)