Quotes from Mark Twain

Children have but little charity for each other's defects.

he could be suspected of knowing anything about the murder, but still he could not be comfortable in the midst of this gossip. It kept him in a cold

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground - for we have all been babies.

The moment I got a chance I slipped aside privately and touched an ancient common looking man on the shoulder and said, in an insinuating, confidential way: Friend, do me a kindness. Do you belong to the asylum, or are you just on a visit or something like that? He looked me over stupidly, and said: Marry, fair sir, me seemeth— That will do, I said; I reckon you are a patient.

she clung to him, she poured out her terrors, her unavailing regrets, and the far echoes turned them all to jeering laughter.

wish you were with the cannibals and it was dinner-time.

A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them

one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine.

everything in a dream is more deep and strong and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal life which is ours when we go awake and clothed with our artificial selves in this vague and dull-tinted artificial world.

And when it comes to beauty - and goodness too - she lays over them all. I hain't ever seen her since that time that I see her go out of that door; no, I hain't ever seen her since, but I reckon I've thought of her a many and a many a million times, and of her saying she would pray for me; and if ever I'd a thought it would do any good for me to pray for her, blamed if I wouldn't a done it or bust.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscious: this is the ideal life.

I sometimes wonder if the world is run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who mean it.

Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church.  More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage, stop to pray before cutting his throat; more than once I had seen a noble, after ambushing and despatching his enemy, retire to the nearest wayside shrine and humbly give thanks, without even waiting to rob the body.

Y la iglesia era sabia, sutil y conocía muchas maneras de esquilmar una oveja, o una nación.

No you can't." "I can." "You can't." "Can!" "Can't!" An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said: "What's your name?" "'Tisn't any of your business, maybe." "Well I 'low I'll MAKE it my business." "Well why don't you?" "If you say much, I will." "Much—much—MUCH. There now.

Mein Herz ist voller Dankbarkeit, aber meine Armut an deutschen Worten zwingt mich zu großer Sparsamkeit des Ausdruckes.

The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West at the period of this story—that is to say, thirty or forty years ago.

It is not well, when writing an autobiography, to follow your ancestry down too close to your own time—it is safest to speak only vaguely of your great-grandfather, and then skip from there to yourself, which I now do. I was born without teeth—and there Richard III had the advantage of me; but I was born without a humpback, likewise, and there I had the advantage of him. My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest. But

No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.

But now a thought occurs to me. My own history would really seem so tame contrasted with that of my ancestors, that it is simply wisdom to leave it unwritten until I am hanged. If some other biographies I have read had stopped with the ancestry until a like event occurred, it would have been a felicitous thing, for the reading public. How does it strike you? AWFUL

and a manner so peculiar and romantic, and extraneous, and ad libitum, and heart-searching, that—that—he—he is an impressionist, I presume? No, said the captain simply, he is a Presbyterian.

There are two types of people. People who have accomplished things and people who have claimed to accomplish things. The first group is less crowded.

You will be more disappointed in life by the things that you do not do than by the things that you do.

The Shepherdsons done the same. It was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness; but everybody said it was a good sermon, and they all talked it over going home, and had such a powerful lot to say about faith and good works and free grace and preforeordestination, and I don't know what all, that it did seem to me to be one of the roughest Sundays I had run across yet.