Top 2442 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Twain - Page 36

It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.

Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.

A man may have no bad habits and have worse

I am not an American. I am the American.

I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument an an unsuspected yearning to play on it, which are bound to wake up an demand attention someday. Therefore you who rail at such that disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a guitar, beware! For sooner or later your own time will come.

The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are 'no account,' go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them-if the people you go among suffer by the operation.

There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory

A dream...I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.

A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them.

...the circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.

Children have but little charity for one another's defects

....try the mustard, - a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard.

I have learned that human existence is essentially tragic. It is only the love of God, disclosed and enacted in Christ, that redeems the human tragedy and makes it tolerable. No, more than tolerable. Wonderful.

I would not rob you of your food or your clothes or your umbrella, but if I caught your German out I would take it. But I don't study any more,- I have given it up.

It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think you've got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No- and I see now plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you can't fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business.

I will remark in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is "hogwash"

I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry.

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

Sometimes people do get hurt

There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing

A soiled baby with a neglected nose cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.

Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW is only a small step and quickly taken.

The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Warm summer sun, shine kindly here.

The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling;the comic and the witty story upon the matter.

More than one cigar at a time is excessive smoking.

We all belong to the nasty stinking little human race, & of course it is not nice for God's beloved vermin to scoff at each other... Oh, we are a nasty little lot-& to think there are people who would like to save us & continue us. It won't happen if I have any influence.

They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin' ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property.

Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.

As for the dinosaur - But Noah's conscience was easy; it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal and America had not then been discovered.

But we are all insane, anyway. Note the mountain-climbers.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined.

I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave.

My advice to girls: first, don't smoke - to excess; second, don't drink - to excess; third, don't marry - to excess.

Heaven is the very last place to come to rest and don't you be afraid to bet on that!

The report of my illness grew out of his (James Clemens) illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration.

There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angelship.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery!

I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.

In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.

If we could imagine such a man, that is a man who could invent the fly and send him out on his mission and furnish him with his orders: Depart into the uttermost corners of the earth and, diligently do your appointed work. Persecute the sick child, settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting, worry and fret and madden the worn and tried mother who watches by the child and humbly prays for mercy and relief with the pathetic faith of the deceived and the unteachable.

In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm.

It is plain that there is one moral law for heaven and another for the earth. The pulpit assures us that wherever we see suffering and sorrow, which we can relieve and do not, we sin, heavily. There was never yet a case of suffering or sorrow which God could not relieve. Does He sin then?

Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance.

It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. That is where the true evil lies.

No one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms-fortunately harmless forms as a rule.

What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows - it must grow; nothing can prevent it.

As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!

That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they are and get bribes for it and become wealthy.

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.

The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils, but give me the banjo.

For instance, take this sample: he has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race - and of ours - sexual intercourse!It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed-for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!

More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.