Quotes from Mark Twain

Ah, if he could only die temporarily!

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.

If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.

Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that but the really great make you feel that you too can become great. When you are seeking to bring big plans to fruition it is important with whom you regularly associate. Hang out with friends who are like-minded and who are also designing purpose-filled lives. Similarly be that kind of a friend for your friends.

Every person is a book, each year a chapter

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer them, or turn them into literature.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

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

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

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

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 anymore.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.

Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Never be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty.

The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.

Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life.

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.

What's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?