Quotes from Mark Twain

One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.

The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.

Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene.

It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor"—

A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.

The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries.

Tom's army won a great victory, after a long and hard-fought battle. Then the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged, the terms of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day for the necessary battle appointed; after which the armies fell into line and marched away, and Tom turned homeward alone.

Work! work! and God will work with us!

Man is a marvelous curiosity … he thinks he is the Creator's pet … he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea?

It made one mad, for pleasure; and we could not take our eyes from him, and the looks that went out of our eyes came from our hearts, and their dumb speech was worship.

The secret of getting ahead is getting started.

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

It's as mild as goose-milk.

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.

I don't have time to write you a short letter, so I'm writing you a long one instead.

One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it can't tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin.

First they done a lecture on temperance; but they didn't make enough for them both to get drunk on. Then in another village they started a dancing-school; but they didn't know no more how to dance than a kangaroo does; so the first prance they made the general public jumped in and pranced them out of town. Another time they tried to go at yellocution; but they didn't yellocute long till the audience got up and give them a solid good cussing, and made them skip out.

More men go to church than want to.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

In the country neighbor­hood thereabouts, along the dusty roads, one found at intervals the prettiest little cottage homes, snug and cozy, and so cobwebbed with vines snowed thick with roses that the doors and windows were wholly hidden from sight-sign that these were deserted homes, forsaken years ago by defeated and disap­pointed families who could neither sell them nor give them away.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

Jim said he believed it was spirits, but I says: no, spirits wouldn't say dern the dern fog.

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars--all over Europe, all over the world. Sometimes in the private interest of royal families, Satan said, sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose--there is no such war in the history of the race.

On a book by Henry James: Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up.