Quotes from Mark Twain

Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.

Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.

When I am come to mine own again, I will always honor little children, remembering how that these trusted me and believed me in my time of trouble; whilst they that were older, and thought themselves wiser, mocked at me and held me for a liar.

Children and fools always speak the truth.

Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick.

I deserve it all. Let the cold world do its worst; one thing I know--there's a grave somewhere for me. The world may go on just as its always done, and take everything from me--loved ones, property, everything--but it can't take that. Some day I'll lie down in it and forget it all, and my poor broken heart will be at rest.

Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.

To us, our house was not unsentient matter -- it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction.

It's no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.

Bridgeport? Said I. Camelot, Said he.

Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else.

Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.

There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome.

she makes me wash, they make me comb all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed... the widder [widow] eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she wakes up by a bell-everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

If it is a miracle any sort of evidence will answer. But if it is a fact, proof is necessary.

Being made merely in the image of God but not otherwise resembling him enough to be mistaken by anybody but a very near sighted person.

A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it.

The world is made wrong; kings should go to school to their own laws, at times, and so learn mercy.

That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.

The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.

I am quite sure ... I have no race prejudice, and I think I have no color prejudices, nor caste prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All I care to know is that a man is a human being—this is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

Training- training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are transmitted to us, trained into us.