Quotes from Mark Twain

It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.

It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

But it seems to be a law of human constitution that those that deserve shall not have and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having.

I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.

What a curious kind of fool a girl is. Never been licked in school. What's a licking?

Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!

At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on there clothes to keep them from being stolen.

There is no such thing as material covetousness. All covetousness is spiritual. ...Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.

Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater.

in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Buy land, they're not making it anymore.

Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance.

Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.

I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

Politicians are a lot like diapers. They should be changed frequently, and for the same reasons.

I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.

A sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience.

There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.