Quotes from Mark Twain

We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can show off and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off. All our passengers are paying strict attention to this thing, with the end in view which I have mentioned. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.

I happened to think of something. I knowed mighty well that a drownded man don't float on his back, but on his face. So I knowed, then, that this warn't pap, but a woman dressed up in a man's clothes. So

Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect.

I know now that all that glitters is not gold... However, I still go underrating men of gold, and glorifying men of mica. Commonplace human nature cannot rise above that.

Oh, they have just a bully time—take ships and burn them, and get the money and bury it in awful places in their island where there's ghosts and things to watch it, and kill everybody in the ships—make 'em walk a plank.

Immer, wenn man beginnt die Meinung mit der Mehrheit zu teilen ist es Zeit sich zu besinnen

It is some more Moral Sense. The proprietors are rich, and very holy; but the wage they pay to these poor brothers and sisters of theirs is only enough to keep them from dropping dead with hunger.

I am willing to be a literary thief if it has so been ordained; I am even willing to be caught robbing the ancient dead alongside of Hopkinson Smith, for he is my friend and a good fellow, and I think would be as honest as any one if he could do it without occasioning remark; but I am not willing to antedate his crimes by fifteen hundred years. I must ask you to knock off part of that.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.—[See

down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat. "I never did see

Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession.

If you hold a cat by the tail, you learn things you cannot learn any other way

is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a

At first when the Paladin heard us tell about the glories of the Royal Audience he was broken-hearted because he was not taken with us to it; next, his talk was full of what he would have done if he had been there; and within two days he was telling what he did do when he was there.

And now and then his mind reverted to his treatment by those rude Christ's Hospital Boys, and he said, When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teaching out of books; for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved and the heart. I will keep this diligently in my remembrance, that this day's lesson be not lost upon me, and my people suffer thereby; for learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity.

Why shouldn't we be honest and honorable, and lie every time we get a chance? That is to say, why shouldn't we be consistent, and either lie all the time or not at all?

Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice!

the Welshman allowed it to eat into the vitals of his visitors

Perdón es el aroma que la violeta deja en el zapato que la aplastó.

At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity.

There are," said Twain, "certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate… We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express, and another one -- the one we use -- which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy.

She warn't particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes.

Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn't no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn't anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it.

Necessity knows no law.