Quotes from Mark Twain

There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.

Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

Be good and you will be lonesome.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. [ Mark Twain, a Biography ]

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

Comparison is the death of joy.

That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

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