Quotes from Mark Twain

A body can't be too partic'lar how they talk 'bout these-yer dead people, Tom.

old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can't learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is.

I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead.

I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

But it's awluz jis' so; people dat's sot, stays sot; dey won't look into noth'n'en fine it out f'r deyselves, en when you fine it out en tell um 'bout it, dey doan' b'lieve you.

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher

I realize from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night.

Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that's got sand in it.

there was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says: Who dah? He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us; we could a touched him, nearly.

Maturity...is fatal to so many enchantments.

The governor had made up his mind to one thing: Joan was either a witch or a saint, and he meant to find out which it was.

Dogs go to heaven

The idea of you lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind - as long as it's day-time and you're not behind him.

You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.

The window went up, a maid-servant's discordant voice profaned the holy calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr's remains!

Not long after, as Tom, all undressed for bed, was surveying his drenched garments by the light of

a devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can't see 'em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear 'em talk; and when they're

As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff Potter to its bosom and fondled him as lavishly as it had abused him before. But that sort of conduct is to the world's credit; therefore it is not well to find fault with it.

Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian—not to acquire his religion, but his guns. The Turk and the Chinaman will buy those to kill missionaries and converts with.

One poor chap, who had no other grandeur to offer, said with tolerably manifest pride in the remembrance: 'Well, Tom Sawyer he licked me once.' But that bid for glory was a failure. Most of the boys could say that, and so that cheapened the distinction too much. ~From The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Scene where the neighbor boys were lamenting over Tom's apparent drowning.

I would take up wickedness

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

For a little while, hope made a show of reviving-not with any reason to back it, but only because it is its nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age and familiarity with failure.

I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it.