Quotes from Mark Twain

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.

Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

the size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider's measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it.

Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Each place has its own advantages - heaven for the climate, and hell for the society.

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times.

You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool.

Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.

It was a dreadful thing to see. Humans beings can be awful cruel to one another.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks.

Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Then the old man got to cussing, and cussed everything and everybody he could think of, and then cussed them all over again to make sure he hadn't skipped any, and after that he polished off with a kind of a general cuss all round, including a considerable parcel of people which he didn't know the names of, and so called them what's-his-name, when he got to them, and went right along with his cussing.

Eventually, I sickened of people, myself included, who didn't think enough of themselves to make something of themselves- people who did only what they had to and never what they could have done. I learned from them the infected loneliness that comes at the end of every misspent day. I knew I could do better.

He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though—and loathed him.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to hell'- and tore it up.

A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.

It is easier to fool the people, than to convince them they have been fooled. No man's life,liberty, and property are safe while the legislature is in session.

You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it; and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not for the world.

He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.

Steal a chicken if you get a chance, Huck, because if you don't want it, someone else does and a good deed ain't never forgotten.

I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise.