Quotes from Mark Twain

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.

Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep 'til noon.

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

It is better to be alone than unwelcome. - Eve

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.

The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.

She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection.

I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately.

Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

Humor is tragedy plus time.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the elect have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so slow, so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate.

Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

Use the right word, not its second cousin.

I don't like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell, you see, I have friends in both places.

He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'.

Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

Just when I thought I was learning how to live, 'twas then I realized I was learning how to die.

All I care to know about a man is that he is a human being... he can't be any worse.

Stars and shadows ain't good to see by.

Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.

I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.