Quotes from Mark Twain

it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. 

Cuando recordamos que todos somos locos, la vida queda explicada

That which I have seen, in that little moment, will never go out from my memory, but will abide there; and I shall see it all the days, and dream of it all the nights, till I die. Would God I had been blind!

To be great, truly great, you have to be the kind of person who makes the others around you great.

The poetry was all in the anticipation - there is none in the reality.

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain. Notebook

What an ass you are!" Satan said. "Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

What got you into trouble? says the baldhead to t'other chap. Well, I'd been selling an article to take the tartar off the teeth—and it does take it off, too, and generly the enamel along with it—

These descriptions do really state the truth- as nearly as the limitations of language will allow. But language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle, and it can seldom arrange descriptive words in such a way that they will not inflate the facts-by help of the readers imagination, which is always ready to take a hand, and work for nothing, and do the bulk of it at that.

In this same library we saw some drawings by Michael Angelo (these Italians call him Mickel Angelo,) and Leonardo da Vinci. (They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.)

It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are.

One lives to find out.

There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory. The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the deity nor his son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled.

They are common defects of my own, and one mustn't criticise other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself.

There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry.

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities.

Now, children, I want you all to sit up just as straight and pretty as you can and give me all your attention for a minute or two. There - that is it. That is the way good little boys and girls should do. I see one little girl who is looking out of the window - I am afraid she thinks I am out there somewhere - perhaps up in one of the trees making a speech to the little birds. [Applausive titter.]

Mark Twain, cynical about so much else, has a particular reverence in the Holy Land for sitting where a god has stood. What flabbergasted him was that his traveling companions would be in such a sanctified environment and winter what they saw according to other writers or their denominational background instead their own experience with the holy.

Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church. ('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980)

TOM! No answer. TOM! No answer. What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM! No answer. The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked THROUGH them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for style, not service-- she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well.

Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him.

Ah, heavens and earth, friend, if you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.

Of all the animals, man is the only one that lies.