Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
– Mark Twain
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
– Mark Twain
The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anbody will
side with you when you are right.
– Mark Twain
Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.
– Mark Twain
It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and
remove all doubt.
– Mark Twain
Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
– Mark Twain
If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-
informed.
– Mark Twain
The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to
reform itself a little by way of example.
– Mark Twain
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
– Mark Twain
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like,
and do what you’d druther not.
– Mark Twain
There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.
– Mark Twain
Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponent
will do it for you.
– Mark Twain
A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a
time.
– Mark Twain
What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector?
The taxidermist takes only your skin.
– Mark Twain
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
– Mark Twain
Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
– Mark Twain
Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
– Mark Twain
In India, “cold weather” is merely a phrase to distinguish between weather which will melt a
brass doorknob and weather which only makes it mushy.
– Mark Twain
There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it,
and when he can.
– Mark Twain
I like a thin book because it will steady a table; a leather volume because it will strop a razor;
and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat.
– Mark Twain
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than
by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch
the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
– Mark Twain
The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.
– Mark Twain
That’s the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don’t care,
individuals do.
– Mark Twain
You can straighten a worm, but the crook is in him and only waiting.
– Mark Twain
Do good when you can, and charge when you think they will stand it.
– Mark Twain
There’s one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he’s crooked.
– Mark Twain
No woman or man really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of
a century.
– Mark Twain
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
– Mark Twain
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read.
– Mark Twain
Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give
you opportunity to commit more.
– Mark Twain
I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it’s never happened yet.
– Mark Twain
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for
the pleasure of doing it.
– Mark Twain
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
– Mark Twain
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.
– Mark Twain
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much
respects himself.
– Mark Twain
You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
– Mark Twain
Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
– Mark Twain
April 1 is the day upon which we are reminded what we are on the other 364.
– Mark Twain
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
– Mark Twain
We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there;
lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot
stove-lid again – and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
– Mark Twain
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
– Mark Twain
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.
But I repeat myself.
– Mark Twain
I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate
them than to travel with them.
– Mark Twain
There’s nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.
– Mark Twain
When I was younger, I could remember everything, whether it had happened or not.
– Mark Twain
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
– Mark Twain
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
– Mark Twain
Ignorant people think it’s the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it
ain’t so. It’s the sickening grammar they use.
– Mark Twain
The person who has had a bull by the tail once has learned 60 or 70 times as much as a
person who hasn’t.
– Mark Twain
An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music.
– Mark Twain
In writing plays the chief thing is novelty.
The world grows tired of solid forms in all the arts.
– Mark Twain
Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.
– Mark Twain
Between me and Rudyard Kipling, we cover all knowledge. He knows all that can be known,
and I know the rest.
– Mark Twain
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
– Mark Twain
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.
– Mark Twain
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your
complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting with the first one.
– Mark Twain
Adam was the author of sin, and I wish he had taken out an international copyright on it.
– Mark Twain
Loyalty to country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.
– Mark Twain
Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to
divide it with.
– Mark Twain
Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
– Mark Twain
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrowmindedness, and many of our people need it
sorely on these accounts.
– Mark Twain
New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a
scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.
– Mark Twain
I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
– Mark Twain
Few of us can stand prosperity – another man’s I mean.
– Mark Twain
It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others – and less trouble.
– Mark Twain
At 50 a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass.
– Mark Twain
There are people who can do all fine and heroic things except one: keep from telling their
happiness to the unhappy.
– Mark Twain
If smoking is not permitted in Heaven, I won’t go.
– Mark Twain
The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.
– Mark Twain
But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray
for the one sinner that needed it most?
– Mark Twain
Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
– Mark Twain
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back
the minute it begins to rain.
– Mark Twain
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.
– Mark Twain
Necessity is the mother of taking chances.
– Mark Twain
You can’t depend on your judgement when your imagination is out of focus.
– Mark Twain
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
– Mark Twain
Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.
– Mark Twain
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
– Mark Twain
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
– Mark Twain
Drag your thoughts away from your troubles – by the ears, by the heels, or any other way
you can manage it. It’s the healthiest thing a body can do.
– Mark Twain
In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity
furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.
– Mark Twain
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
– Mark Twain
We can secure other people’s approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a
hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.
– Mark Twain
Virtue has never been as respectable as money.
– Mark Twain
A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie.
– Mark Twain
I can live for two months on a good compliment.
– Mark Twain
I went to dinner, which was served in a small private room of the club with the usual piano
and fiddlers present to make conversation difficult and comfort impossible.
– Mark Twain
The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman’s
methods; it remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime.
– Mark Twain
It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing – I used to be a good boy.
– Mark Twain
This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth – ready to shout for
any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when
they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
– Mark Twain
I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
– Mark Twain
Temperate temperance is best.
– Mark Twain
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.
– Mark Twain
All say, “How hard it is that we have to die” – a strange complaint from the mouths of people
who have had to live.
– Mark Twain
I don’t mind what the opposition say of me so long as they don’t tell the truth about me.
– Mark Twain
I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.
– Mark Twain
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.
– Mark Twain
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
– Mark Twain
A natural death is where you die without the aid of a doctor.
– Mark Twain
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
– Mark Twain
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.
– Mark Twain
We believe that out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation.
– Mark Twain
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.
– Mark Twain
Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.
– Mark Twain
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between
lightning and a lightning bug.
– Mark Twain
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
– Mark Twain
We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its
loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human
liberty.
– Mark Twain
There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason.
– Mark Twain
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on
which it is poured.
– Mark Twain
Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think.
– Mark Twain
A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.
– Mark Twain
Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.
– Mark Twain
If books are not good company, where will I find it?
– Mark Twain
The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote from his own.
– Mark Twain
By trying, we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man’s, I mean.
– Mark Twain
Most people cannot bear sitting in church for an hour on a Sunday. How are they supposed
to live somewhere very similar to it for an eternity?
– Mark Twain
We ought never to do wrong when people are looking.
– Mark Twain
One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare.
– Mark Twain
Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.
– Mark Twain
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
– Mark Twain
If a man doesn’t believe as we do, we say he ia a crank, and that settles it. I mean it does
nowadays, because now we can’t burn him.
– Mark Twain
It is a talent by itself to pay compliments gracefully and have them ring true. It’s an art in
itself.
– Mark Twain
Always obey your parents, when they are present. This is the best policy in the long run,
because if you don’t they will make you.
– Mark Twain
The autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he
cannot stop a sneeze.
– Mark Twain
My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.
– Mark Twain
In God We Trust. I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.
– Mark Twain
The principle of give and take is the principle of diplomacy – give one and take ten.
– Mark Twain
There ain’t no way to find out why a snorer can’t hear himself snore.
– Mark Twain
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities;
truth isn’t.
– Mark Twain
To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the onlooking world
consent to it is a finer.
– Mark Twain
Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to
live.
– Mark Twain
There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones.
– Mark Twain
Where every man has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.
– Mark Twain
In the matter of diet I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn’t
agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it.
– Mark Twain
One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a beautiful woman is after considerable
acquaintance with her.
– Mark Twain
To lead a life of undiscovered sin! That is true joy.
– Mark Twain
Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn put into prose form to give it a worldly air.
– Mark Twain
Whatever a man’s age may be, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored
flower in his buttonhole.
– Mark Twain
Do right and you will be conspiciuous.
– Mark Twain
That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant,
self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in
journalism on their way to the poorhouse.
– Mark Twain
My axiom is, to succeed in business: avoid my example.
– Mark Twain
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
– Mark Twain
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so
rare.
– Mark Twain
He had arrived at the point where presently the illusions would cease and he would have
entered upon the realities of life, and God help the man that has arrived at that point.
– Mark Twain
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.
– Mark Twain
Simple rules for saving money: To save half, when you fired by an anger impulse to contribute
to a charity, wait, and count forty. To save three-quarters, count sixty. To save it all, count
sixty-five.
– Mark Twain
We begin to swear before we can talk.
– Mark Twain
Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.
– Mark Twain
When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.
– Mark Twain
Religion had its share in the changes of civilization and national character, of course. What
share? The lion’s.
– Mark Twain
To be good is to be noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
– Mark Twain
The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
– Mark Twain
Pessimist: the optimist who didn’t arrive.
– Mark Twain
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
– Mark Twain
A nation is only an individual multiplied.
– Mark Twain
What then is the true gospel of consistency? Change.
– Mark Twain
When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the
old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had
learned in seven years.
– Mark Twain
When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the
sons of men.
– Mark Twain
It is better to support schools than jails.
– Mark Twain
It seems to me that just in the ratio that our newspapers increase, our morals decay.
– Mark Twain
I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life
which would kill anybody else.
– Mark Twain
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like,
and do what you’d druther not.
– Mark Twain
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
– Mark Twain
The Christian Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice
changes.
– Mark Twain
Some people lie when they tell the truth. I tell the truth lying.
– Mark Twain
Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
– Mark Twain
To my mind, that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble
simplicity.
– Mark Twain
I have seen all the foreign countries I want to see except heaven and hell, and I have only a
vague curiosity as concerns one of those.
– Mark Twain
It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
– Mark Twain
True irreverence is disrespect for another man’s god.
– Mark Twain
Necessity is the mother of “taking chances.”
– Mark Twain
A classic – something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
– Mark Twain
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is
less savage than the other savages.
– Mark Twain
An honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.
– Mark Twain
If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape
hanging?
– Mark Twain
Make it a point to do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule
for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
– Mark Twain
The church is always trying to get other people to reform. It might not be a bad idea to
reform itself a little by way of example.
– Mark Twain
When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.
– Mark Twain
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anyone.
– Mark Twain
To be busy is man’s only happiness.
– Mark Twain
War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet
who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
– Mark Twain
Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.
– Mark Twain
If any man has just merciful and kindly instincts he would be a gentleman, for he would need
nothing else in the world.
– Mark Twain
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
– Mark Twain
I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
– Mark Twain
The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and
are considered a pleasant beverage. One tells them from vinegar by the label.
– Mark Twain
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American
criminal class except Congress.
– Mark Twain
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live
outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
– Mark Twain
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the
insane we should run out of building materials.
– Mark Twain
War – a wanton waste of projectiles.
– Mark Twain
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an
asteroid.
– Mark Twain
Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah didn’t miss the boat.
– Mark Twain
The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.
– Mark Twain
Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are
Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian – not to acquire his
religion, but his guns.
– Mark Twain
There are written laws – they perish.
But there are also unwritten laws – they are eternal.
– Mark Twain
My works are like water. The works of the great masters are like wine. But everyone drinks
water.
– Mark Twain