MARK TWAIN QUOTES II

Human nature is the same everywhere; it deifies success, it has nothing but scorn for defeat.

MARK TWAIN, Joan of Arc

Spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and size most nicely accomodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it.

MARK TWAIN, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.

MARK TWAIN, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.

MARK TWAIN, speech to the Savage Club, Jun. 9, 1899

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

MARK TWAIN, speech, Sep. 23, 1907

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

MARK TWAIN, The Mysterious Stranger

To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.

MARK TWAIN, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, May 30, 1902

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.

MARK TWAIN, letter to George Bainton, Oct. 15, 1888

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.

MARK TWAIN, "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us?"

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

MARK TWAIN, The Innocents Abroad

Heaven for climate, Hell for society.

MARK TWAIN, speech to the Acorn Society, 1901

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

MARK TWAIN, letter to Annie Moffett Webster, Sep. 1, 1876

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

MARK TWAIN, American Claimant

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

MARK TWAIN, "Essay on William Dean Howells"

There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life—life's "experiences"—are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never know one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side.

MARK TWAIN, Taming the Bicycle

H'aint we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?

MARK TWAIN, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

MARK TWAIN, "Which Was the Dream?"

The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

MARK TWAIN, letter to Helen Keller, Mar. 17, 1903

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

MARK TWAIN, an interview with Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel

Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts?... Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity.

MARK TWAIN, "A New Crime"

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others.

MARK TWAIN, The Autobiography of Mark Twain

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.

MARK TWAIN, "Corn Pone Opinions," Europe and Elsewhere

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

MARK TWAIN, speech to the Saturday Morning Club, Boston, Apr. 15, 1882

The teacher reminded us that Rome's liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sell--exactly our own history over again.

MARK TWAIN, "Purchasing Civic Virtue"

Labor in loneliness is irksome.

MARK TWAIN, The Innocents Abroad

There isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting; as a rule all you would see would be a couple of ... people, one of them standing, the other catching flies.

MARK TWAIN, Bite-Size Twain: Wit and Wisdom from the Literary Legend

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world -- and never will.

MARK TWAIN, "Consistency", December 5, 1887

Prosperity is the best protector of principle.

MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator

Virtue never has been as respectable as money.

MARK TWAIN, Innocents Abroad

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