Quotes from Mark Twain

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word.

Consider the flea! Incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.

I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die" — a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

All emotion is involuntary when genuine.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

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.

No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.

To have nothing the matter with you and no habits is pretty tame, pretty colorless. It is just the way a saint feels, I reckon; it is at least the way he looks. I never could stand a saint.

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

It is in the heart that the values lie. I wish I could make him understand that a loving heart is riches, and riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.

I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that my art is not above the ordinary.

When a person is accustomed to 138 in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable.... when they said it was now "cold weather," I saw that they had traveled outside of their sphere of knowledge and were floundering. I believe that in India, "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.

Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.

One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a beautiful woman is after considerable acquaintance with her.

A woman springs a sudden reproach upon you which provokes a hot retort, and then she will presently ask you to apologize.

Men and women -- even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.