Mark Twain Quotes

Mark Twain Quotes :

In a good bookroom, you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.

Jim said that bees won’t sting idiots, but I didn’t believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn’t sting me.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started

It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

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

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

I don’t believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don’t want to. That’s something that you just want to take on trust. It’s a classic … something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.

I couldn’t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn’t think about nothing else.

There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.

Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress, but I repeat myself.

A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.

At the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink – under any circumstances.

Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.

One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case is otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother.

All you need is ignorance and confidence and then success is sure.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.

I have no liking for novels or stories – none in the world; and so, whenever I read one – which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book – my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valueless. Are you saying “You have written stories yourself.” Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.

To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.

By reading keep in a state of excited ignorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don’t know how I got in and can’t find the way out, but I’m having a booming time all to myself. Don’t know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn’t have the question settled for anything in the world.

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself…Anybody can have ideas–the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

It makes one hope and believes that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, the literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

After a few months’ acquaintance with European ‘coffee’ one’s mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it’s clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. The cup is small, it is smeared with grounds; the coffee is black, thick, unsavory of smell, and execrable in taste. The bottom of the cup has a muddy sediment in it half an inch deep. This goes down your throat, and portions of it lodge by the way and produce a tickling aggravation that keeps you barking and coughing for an hour.

Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery.

The average American’s simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak.

See Also :

Mark Twain Quotes on Success

There’s always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Mark Twain Quotes on Travel

The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.

One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.

Mark Twain Quotes on Politics

To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.

Mark Twain Quotes about Cats

While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.

I simply can´t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunnings, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.

Mark Twain Quotes on Bananas Varanasi

Banaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend and looks twice as old as all of them put together

Mark Twain Quotes on Relationships

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Kindness is a language herd by deaf men and felt by blind men.

Mark Twain Quotes on Death

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

Most people can’t bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?

Mark Twain Quotes on Friendship

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.

Mark Twain Quotes on Love

You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

Life is short, Break the Rules. Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably And never regret ANYTHING That makes you smile.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

Mark Twain Quotes about Writing

Don’t look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it.

Don’t say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream.

Mark Twain Quotes on Government

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

The government is merely a servant – merely a temporary servant. It cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong and decide who is a patriot and who isn’t. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Mark Twain Quotes on India

India is the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend and the great grandmother of tradition

Mark Twain Quotes on April Fools Day

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them, the rest of us could not succeed.

Mark Twain Quotes about Reading

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion.

Mark Twain Quotes about Huck Finn

Hain’s we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?

Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

Mark Twain Quotes on Education

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

A person who won’t read has no advantage over one who can’t read.

Life is short, Break the Rules. Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably And never regret ANYTHING That makes you smile.

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

Motivational Quotes by Mark Twain

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

Funny Mark Twain Quotes