Quotes from Mark Twain

Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

The secret to getting ahead is getting started.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize 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. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.