Quotes from Mark Twain

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather, as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.

Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.

He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly.

I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.

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.

In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

The serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.

I'll learn him or kill him.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.

It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!

Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

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.

Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.

I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't.

When a German dives into a sentence, you won't see him again until he emerges at the other end with the verb between his teeth.

It was a monstrous big river down there.

Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie — I found that out.

Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.

There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration—and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on the people to see how they will go…. Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.

Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century, but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another.

I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning… the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.