Quotes from Mark Twain

No fact is more firmly established than that lying is a necessity of our circumstances--the deduction that it is then a Virtue goes without saying.

The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French.

it began with a prayer built from the ground up of solid courses of Scriptural quotations, welded together with a thin mortar of originality; and from the summit of this she delivered a grim chapter of the Mosaic Law, as from Sinai.

feel as the good God feels when He looks out on His fleets of constellations ploughing the awful deeps of space and reflects with satisfaction that they are His—all His.

we made a few bushels of first-rate blasting powder

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

that shows you the power of music, that magician of magicians ; who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money.

You have had time enough. I have given you every advantage, and not interfered. It is plain your magic is weak. It is only fair that I begin now." I made about three passes in the air, and then there was an awful crash and

Pray for me! I reckoned if she knowed me she'd take a job that was more nearer her size.

However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

Long, long before the missionaries braved a thousand privations to come and make them permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there.

La promesa de no hacer una cosa es el medio más seguro del mundo para tener ganas de hacerla.

They read those playful trifles in the solidest terms, and decided without hesitancy that if there had ever been any doubt that Dave Wilson was a pudd'nhead — which there hadn't — this revelation removed that doubt for good and all.

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

It was an effective miracle.

Não tenho medo da morte. Estive morto por bilhões e bilhões de anos antes de meu nascimento, e isso nunca me causou qualquer inconveniência.

to make a pledge of any kind is to declare war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man.

The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.

A home without a cat —and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat —may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

Look at the opportunities here for a man of knowledge, brains, pluck, and enterprise to sail in and grow up with the country. The grandest field that ever was; and all my own; not a competitor; not a man who wasn't a baby to me in acquirements and capacities; whereas, what would I amount to in the twentieth century? I should be foreman of a factory, that is about all; and could drag a seine downstreet any day and catch a hundred better men than myself.

What dost thou know of suffering and oppression? I and my people know, but not thou.

By the tenets of the Zoroastrian religion, the elements, Earth, Fire, and Water, are sacred, and must not be contaminated by contact with a dead body. Hence corpses must not be burned, neither must they be buried. None may touch the dead or enter the Towers where they repose except certain men who are officially appointed for that purpose. They receive high pay, but theirs is a dismal life, for

Children and fools _always_ speak the truth. The deduction is plain --adults and wise persons _never_ speak it.