Quotes from Mark Twain

If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape? No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love.

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.

You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.

Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!

I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way.

Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?

A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can't travel any way but sideways and backways.

The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation.

Travel is lethal to prejudice.

In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.

...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.

One must travel, to learn.

The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.

They spell it da Vinci and pronounce it da Vinchy. Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.

...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.

To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye-what ye say of me is now of no consequence.

Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.

Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry.

I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong and he said: "Yes: the little one does."

In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.