Quotes from Mark Twain

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.

It was a good pup, was that Andrew Jackson, and would have made a name for hisself if he'd lived, for the stuff was in him, and he had genius—I know it, because he hadn't had no opportunities to speak of, and it don't stand to reason that a dog could make such a fight as he could under them circumstances, if he hadn't no talent.

I will conclude this chapter with a remark that I am sincerely proud to be able to make—and glad, as well, that my comrades cordially endorse it, to wit: by far the handsomest women we have seen in France were born and reared in America. I feel now like a man who has redeemed a failing reputation and shed luster upon a dimmed escutcheon, by a single just deed done at the eleventh hour. Let the curtain fall, to slow music.

All emotion is involuntary when genuine.

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

A jury of inquest was impaneled, and after due deliberation and inquiry they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been so familiar to our ears all the days of our lives—NOBODY TO BLAME.

Life is planned with one principle objective to make you do all the particular things you particularly don't want to do.

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass. Notebook When

What are you giving me? I said.  Get along back to your circus, or I'll report you. Now what does this man do but fall back a couple of hundred yards and then come rushing at me as hard as he could tear, with his nail-keg bent down nearly to his horse's neck and his long spear pointed straight ahead.  I saw he meant business, so I was up the tree when he arrived.

I do not wish to hear about the moon from someone who has not been there.

Talk? Well, it's just Muff Potter, Muff Potter, Muff Potter all the time. It keeps me in a sweat, constant, so's I want to hide som'ers." "That's just the same way they go on round me. I reckon he's a goner. Don't you feel sorry for him, sometimes?" "Most always—most always. He ain't

So I gave up the idea of a circus, and concluded he was from an asylum.  But we never came to an asylum—so I was up a stump, as you may say.

My complaint simply concerns the decay of the _art_ of lying. 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.

Tom did play hookey, and

He knows that in the whole history of the race of men no single great and high and beneficent thing was ever done for the souls and bodies, the hearts and the brains, of the children of this world, but a Mugwump started it and Mugwumps carried it to victory. And their names are the stateliest in history: Washington, Garrison, Galileo, Luther, Christ. Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.

this dreadful matter brought from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage against these oppressors.  They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty and outrage so long that nothing could have startled them but a kindness.

O homem que não lê não tem nenhuma vantagem sobre o homem que não sabe ler.

Man muß die Tatsachen kennen, bevor man sie verdrehen kann.

Ein Kuss ist eine Sache, für die man beide Hände braucht.

Zihnin ahlaki aksam? yap?s? uyar?nca, özgürce ÅŸu veya bu eylemde bulunur ve zihnin bu konuya iliÅŸkin duygular?na bir hayli kay?ts?z kal?r - yani, kal?rd?, eÄŸer zihnin herhangi bir duygusu olsayd?; ki yoktur. Zihin sadece bir termometredir: s?cakl??? ve soÄŸukluÄŸu gösterir, ikisi hakk?nda da daha fazlas?n? umursamaz.

And it is all as tranquil and reposeful as dreamland, and has nothing this-worldly about it—nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon. Until the unholy train comes tearing along—which it presently does, ripping the sacred solitude to rags and tatters with its devil's warwhoop and the roar and thunder of its rushing wheels—and

What further does it tell us? This: that the assassin was left-handed. How do I know this? I should not be able to explain to you, gentlemen, how I know it, the signs being so subtle that only long experience and deep study can enable one to detect them. But the signs are here, and they are reinforced by a fact which you must have often noticed in the great detective narratives—that all assassins are left-handed. By

I installed a skylight in my apartment... the people who live above me are furious!

Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.