Quotes from Mark Twain

It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.

Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

To say a compliment well is a high art and few possess it.

They did not know it was impossible so they did it

You are about as happy as you make up your mind to be.

A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.

Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.

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.

There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.

My interest in my work dies a sudden and violent death when the work is done.

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.

Talent without work is useless, thank God

Let us save the tomorrows for work.

I do not like work even when someone else is doing it.

God's noblest work. Man who found it out? Man.

No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.

Never learn to do anything: if you don't learn, you'll always find someone else to do it for you.

A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and -nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stock snuggles into your heart in the same way.

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.

Find a job you enjoy doing, and you will never have to work a day in your life.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.