Quotes from Mark Twain

He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.

She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the notion—there warn't no back-down to her, I judge.

But I have never ceased to think of that girl. I have written to her, but I can not direct the epistle because her name is one of those nine-jointed Russian affairs, and there are not letters enough in our alphabet to hold out. I am not reckless enough to try to pronounce it when I am awake, but I make a stagger at it in my dreams

Such incidents usually move me to try to find relief in the building of a maxim. It is a good way, because if you have luck you can get the venom out of yourself and into the maxim; then comfort and a healed spirit follow. Maxims are not easy to make; they do not come in right shape at the first call; they are creatures of evolution, of development; you have to try several plans before you get one that suits you, or even comes fairly near to suiting you.

inaugurated. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Notwithstanding all this furniture, there was still room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat in, at least with entire security to the cat. However, the room was large, for a ship's stateroom, and was in every way satisfactory.

Virtue never has been as respectable as money.

Cada vez que se encuentre usted del lado de la mayoría, es tiempo de hacer una pausa y reflexionar.

Presently she stepped into the kitchen, and Sid, happy in his immunity, reached for the sugar-bowl—a sort of glorying over Tom which was wellnigh unbearable. But Sid's fingers slipped and the bowl dropped and broke. Tom was in ecstasies. In such ecstasies that he even controlled his tongue and was silent. He

Every man is born to one possession which out values all his others - his last breath.

Certainly. Of course. That's part of it. And always coming to school or when we're going home, you're to walk with me, when there ain't anybody looking – and you choose me and I choose you at parties, because that's the way you do when you're engaged.

The man who speaks an injurious truth lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving. The

The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the other half at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called separable verbs. The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance.

DECEMBER 26TH. The dog came to see me at eight o'clock this morning. He was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room will be his quarters hereafter.

But the lawyer he jumps on the table and yells, and says: "Gentlemen—gentlemen! Hear me just a word—just a single word—if you please! There's one way yet—let's go and dig up the corpse and look.

I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told

Age is a thing about mind over matter: if you don't mind it doesn't matter.

I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty and paralysis to human thought.

I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I found' a good place. I went into de woods en jedged I wouldn' fool wid raffs no mo', long as dey move de lantern roun' so. I had my pipe en a plug er dog-leg, en some matches in my cap, en dey warn't wet, so I 'uz all right.

In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.

What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe.

In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.

Jane Austen makes me detest all her characters, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her characters up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worthwhile, too. Some day I might examine the other end of her books and see.

The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example. It is still clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.