Top 2442 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Twain - Page 39

Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.

Knighterrantry is a most chuckleheaded trade, and it is tedious hard work, too, but I begin to see that there is money in it, after all, if you have luck. Not that I would ever engage in it, as a business, for I wouldn't. No sound and legitimate business can be established on a basis of speculation. A successful whirl in the knighterrantry line--now what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts? It's just a corner in pork, that's all.

All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood.

I don't want no better book than what your face is.

If you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!

Nothing is made in vain, but the fly came near it.

You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure--because he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhaps;but otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.

The worst thing you can do to a man is to tell him he can have what he wants.

Be good and you'll be lonesome

If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterwards act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your better judgment.

Steal a chicken if you get a chance, Huck, because if you don't want it, someone else does and a good deed ain't never forgotten.

Every man has a secret ambition: To outsmart horses, fish and women.

You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool.

The first half of my life I went to school, the second half of my life I got an education.

Thanksgiving Day - Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.

My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy--a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak. At irregular intervals this neutrality was broken, and suffering ensued; but I will be candid enough to say that the breaking and the suffering were always divided up with strict impartiality between us--which is to say, my father did the breaking, and I did the suffering.

If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

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.

Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That, of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still, while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable.

The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind.

I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.

If true, rarely beautiful. If beautiful, rarely true.

If there is one thing that is really cheerful in the world, it is cheerfulness. I have noticed it often. And I have noticed that when a man is right down cheerful, he is seldom unhappy for the time being. Such is the nature of man.

Adam did not want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden.

If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty.

Sometimes I lifted a chicken that warn't roosting comfortable, and took him along. Pap always said, take a chicken when you get achance, because if you don't want him yourself you can easy find somebody that does, and a good deed ain't ever forgot. I never see papa when he didn't want the chicken himself, but that is what he used to say, anyway.

from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this.

Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it.

There isn't a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights.

I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. I had my twenty-dollar gold piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it.... I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses, when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use in wasting it on them.

To avoid lying, do nothing that needs covering.

As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and ... Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.

Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.

Thanksgiving day. Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks now, but the turkeys.

We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.

Public Servant: Persons chosen by the people to distribute the graft.

They say that you can't live by bread alone, but I can live on compliments.

Like most people, I often feel mean, and act accordingly.

Good exercise for the heart: reach out and help your neighbor

Water is an individual, an animal, and is alive, remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined, constitute a third individual-and yet each continues to be an individual....here was mute Nature explaining the sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed.

Don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always happens?

The best of us would rather be popular than right.

The water is clearer than the air, and the air is the air that angels breathe.

Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.

If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error.

Narrative should flow as flows the brook down through the hills and the leafy woodlands...a brook that never goes straight for a minute, but goes and goes briskly, sometimes ungrammatically, and sometimes fetching a horseshoe of ¾ of a mile around and at the end of the circuit flowing within a yard of the path that it traversed an hour before; but always going and always following at least one law, always loyal to that law, the law of narrative, which has no law. Nothing to do but make the trip; the how of it is not important, so that the trip is made.

It must be well-nigh a maximum of sense to behave so that one escapes being hanged.

Today's burdens can strengthen you for tomorrow.

There is no accounting for human beings.

There's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.

How unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant

All human rules are more or less idiotic.

The Book of Mormon is chloroform in print

The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong.

Not all the Greek runners in the original Olympics were totally naked. Some wore shoes.

I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography.

Every year you wait, long ago gets farther away.

We can't always have the beautiful aspect of things. Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful and let the others go

When one has tasted watermelons, one knows what angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took; we know it because she repented.

Time spent with your children is time wisely spent.