Quotes from Mark Twain

I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.

He had a dream and it shot him.

Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

Australian History: .... does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies.

I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!

There has been much tragedy in my life; at least half of it actually happened.

A woman's intuition is better than a man's. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.

But as soon as one is at rest in this world off he goes on something else to worry about.

The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.

Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of a man he has struck bottom... there is no lower deep for him.

We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you.

The nomadic instinct is a human instinct;

Then the cow asked: What is a mirror? It is a hole in the wall, said the cat. You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy.

I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction

Jim he couldn't see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him;

This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth--ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there! - Letter to J. H. Twichell, 1/29/1901

Âdem, yaln?zca bir insand?. Bu her ÅŸeyi aç?kl?yor. Elmay?, yemek için deÄŸil, yasak olduÄŸu için istemiÅŸti. As?l hata, y?lan? yasaklamam?? olmakt?. Çünkü o zaman onu yemek isteyecekti.

When you want genuine music -- music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose, -- when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!

Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information.

Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

You can't pray a lie Huck Finn

The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to the heart, and seeing it done.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.