Top 2442 Quotes & Sayings by Mark Twain - Page 6

College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do day after tomorrow just as well.

Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.

Data is like garbage. You'd better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.

great people are those who make others feel that they, too, can become great.

I hate to hear people say this Judge will vote so and so, because he is a Democrat -- and this one so and so because he is a Republican. It is shameful. The Judges have the Constitution for their guidance; they have no right to any politics save the politics of rigid right and justice when they are sitting in judgment upon the great matters that come before them.

Adam was the luckiest man in the world. He had no mother-in-law.

Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.

Strange a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none Himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon Himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship Him!

Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it.

The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.

When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.

The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

The secret of making progress is to get started.

Additional problems are the offspring of poor solutions.

Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.

Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.

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.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hand.

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.

I told you this would happen. But, no, you had to go for the buffet, didn't you?

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. When you are seeking to bring big plans to fruition it is important with whom you regularly associate. Hang out with friends who are like-minded and who are also designing purpose-filled lives. Similarly be that kind of a friend for your friends.

If you have nothing to say, say nothing.

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. There is nothing more satisfying than that sense of being completely "at home" in your own skin. When you achieve that as a natural state of "being", then you can finally look beyond yourself and fully contribute all your talents to the world.

Among other common lies, we have the silent lie - the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they speak no lie, they lie not at all.

No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.

You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs.

If there is a God, he is a malign thug.

Begin with the determination to succeed and the work is half done already.

Men are like bank accounts. The more money, the more interest they generate.

We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter -- exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place -- the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.

Those who do not read the news are uninformed. Those who do are misinformed.

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

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.

I saw a startling sight today, a politician with his hands in his own pockets.

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.

The difference between those that succeed and those that fail is, those that succeeded tried.

A marriage...makes of two fractional lives a whole; it gives to two purposeless lives a work, and doubles the strength of each to perform it; it gives to two questioning natures a reason for living, and something to live for; it will give a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, and a new mystery to life.

If a person offends you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance, and hit him with a brick.

The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.

Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

So avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won't do in your essays. What you do today is important, because you are sacrificing a day of your life for it. 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.

Some of the worst things in my life never even happened.

We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.

Enthusiasm is caught, not taught.

I am pushing sixty. That is enough exercise for me.

Don't wait the time is never just right.

To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth.

I am able to say that while I am not ruggedly well, I am not ill enough to excite an undertaker.