Quotes from Mark Twain

A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch.

Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns, he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man, with his mouth.

Yes, King Edward VI lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them worthily.

To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.

My experience of men had long ago taught me that one of the surest ways of begetting an enemy was to do some stranger an act of kindness which should lay upon him the irritating sense of an obligation.

There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Fenimore Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.

Two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind—politics and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more.

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

And when he awoke in the morning and looked upon the wretchedness about him, his dream had had its usual effect: it had intensified the sordidness of his surroundings a thousandfold.

It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. And besides, it furnished me seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others; twelve years of preparation, and two years of writing. The others need no preparation and got none.

Then she told me all about the bad place, and said I wished I was there. She got mad, then, but I didn't mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres, all I wanted was a change, I warn't particular

If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment.

Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything else about the discourse.

Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.

Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying.

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on 'The Survival of the Fittest.' These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

I reckon the widow or the parson or somebody prayed that this bread would find me, and here it have gone and done it. So there ain't no doubt but there is something in that thing. That is, there's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.

Everything in moderation except whiskey, and sometimes too much whiskey is just enough.

You cannot trust your eyes, if your imagination is out of focus.

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

A feud is this way: A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man's brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in -- and by and by everybody's killed off, and there ain't no more feud. But it's kind of slow, and takes a long time.

All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the gardener with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

You can't pray a lie--I found that out.