Quotes About Mark Twain

I was... blaspheming my luck in a way that made my breath smell of brimstone.

Profanity is more necessary to me than is immunity from colds.

There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.

Mark Twain said the same thing better: "Heaven for climate; hell for society.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it.

Whereas the Odyssey represents the maturity of the moral consciousness of a whole people, Huckleberry Finn shows only its beginnings in the mind of a child. And with a self-protective dexterity that would not have surprised Mark Twain in the least, the adult racist mentality of America has dealt with the threat of that beginning by decreeing that Huckleberry Finn is not a book for the chastening of adults, which to a large extent it certainly is, but a book for the entertainment of children.

Mark Twain was a great traveler and he wrote three or four great travel books. I wouldn't say that I'm a travel novelist but rather a novelist who travels - and who uses travel as a background for finding stories of places.

I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release.

This is something Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens wrote, or whatever: To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.

In his trip to Bethlehem Mark Twain had reported that all sects of Christians, except Protestants, had chapels under the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. However, he also observed that one group dared not trespass on the other's territory, proving beyond doubt, he noted, that even the grave of the Savior couldn't inspire peaceful worship among different beliefs.

Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.

I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant.

A soiled baby with a neglected nose cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.

To me, real humor is very serious. Mark Twain's humor in Huckleberry Finn is funny, but it's about very serious things. It's a deeper, richer laugh for me.

The only thing that a critical spirit, nagging, and negativity bring to a relationship is lack of intimacy. Many people were raised in homes where "shame-based parenting" was the rule rather than the exception. For many, there is a natural tendency to focus on the negative side of life, but that just doesn't work in relationships. There is incredible power in encouragement and affirmation. Mark Twain once said, "I can live two months on one good compliment.

My advice to girls: first, don't smoke to excess; second, don't drink to excess; third, don't marry to excess.

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

Mark Twain was credited with saying, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.

Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.

Obscurity and competence: That is the life that is worth living.

Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.