Quotes from Mark Twain

Eschew surplusage.

So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.

I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and then they would be honest so much earlier.

We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened - Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course It could be done.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking.

We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.

It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.

We are all alike on the inside.

Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove!

When in doubt, tell the truth.

I said nothing of the sort.

Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption.

Summer is the time when it is too hot to do the job that it was too cold to do last winter.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely? Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, There is no other.

I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.

It does us all good to unbend sometimes.

I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72

There are more chickens than a man can know in this world, but an unprovoked kindness is the rarest of birds.

Switzerland would me a mighty big place if it were ironed flat.

But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so. - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

it don't make no diference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.