Quotes from Mark Twain

His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

he hoped she would be happy, and never regret having driven her poor boy out into the unfeeling world to suffer and die.

Anybody can have ideas—the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.

your lip, says he. You've put on considerable many frills since I been away. I'll take you down

There isn't anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it.

What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything.

I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. ~Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

No brute ever does a cruel thing—that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense.

I waked that I judged it was after eight o'clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

You can't put too much spin on a miracle.

I do not mind Bedouins,—I am not afraid of them; because neither Bedouins nor ordinary Arabs have shown any disposition to harm us, but I do feel afraid of my own comrades.

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.

It is full of interest, it has noble poetry in it and some clever fables and some blood drenched history, some good morals and a wealth of obscenity and upwards of a thousand lies. (Re The Bible)

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

It gratified all the vicious vanity that was in him;

He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a consul at home.

Never learn to do anything: if you don't learn, you'll always find someone else to do it for you.

We do not get ice-cream every where, and so, when we do, we are apt to dissipate to excess. We never cared any thing about ice-cream at home, but we look upon it with a sort of idolatry now that it is so scarce in these red-hot climates of the East.

In light matters--matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things--he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat.

They did not know that the quicker a fresh-water fish is on the fire after he is caught the better he is;

Human nature is all alike.