Mark Twain

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

— Mark Twain

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.

— Mark Twain

I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.

— Mark Twain

Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.

— Mark Twain

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

— Mark Twain

Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.

— Mark Twain

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.

— Mark Twain

When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.

— Mark Twain

A man cannot be made comfortable without his own approval.

— Mark Twain

Sometimes too much drink is barely enough.

— Mark Twain

Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody.

— Mark Twain

Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

— Mark Twain

In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?

— Mark Twain

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

— Mark Twain

There isn't a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.

— Mark Twain

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

— Mark Twain

When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.

— Mark Twain

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

— Mark Twain

It is nobler to be good, and it is nobler to teach others to be good -- and less trouble!

— Mark Twain

That's what an army is -- a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers.

— Mark Twain

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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.

— Mark Twain

A banker is a fellow who lends his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

— Mark Twain

A man's house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house. Always it is an essential -- there was but one of its kind. It cannot be replaced. It was in that house. It is irrevocably lost. It will be years before the tale of lost essentials is complete, and not till then can he truly know the magnitude of his disaster.

— Mark Twain

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

— Mark Twain

There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.

— Mark Twain

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

— Mark Twain

Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.

— Mark Twain

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

— Mark Twain

People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.

— Mark Twain

My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.

— Mark Twain

The man who does not read books has no advantage over the man that can not read them.

— Mark Twain

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

— Mark Twain

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

— Mark Twain

Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

— Mark Twain

Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket.

— Mark Twain

Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

— Mark Twain

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

— Mark Twain

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.

— Mark Twain

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.

— Mark Twain

I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell -- you see, I have friends in both places.

— Mark Twain

If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people.

— Mark Twain

I think a compliment ought to always precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception.

— Mark Twain

Noise proves nothing, Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

— Mark Twain

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.

— Mark Twain

There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me --I always feel that they have not said enough.

— Mark Twain

If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.

— Mark Twain

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

— Mark Twain

I can live for two months on a good compliment.

— Mark Twain

We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.

— Mark Twain

Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

— Mark Twain

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world -- and never will.

— Mark Twain

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

— Mark Twain

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

— Mark Twain

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.

— Mark Twain

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.

— Mark Twain

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear -- not absence of fear.

— Mark Twain

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.

— Mark Twain

It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

— Mark Twain

The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.

— Mark Twain

There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice.

— Mark Twain

Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly -- a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

— Mark Twain

Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

— Mark Twain

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: -- I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.

— Mark Twain

A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.

— Mark Twain

The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.

— Mark Twain

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

— Mark Twain

Sacred cows make the best hamburger.

— Mark Twain

By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.

— Mark Twain

On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.

— Mark Twain

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

— Mark Twain

Why is it that we rejoice at birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.

— Mark Twain

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

— Mark Twain

We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.

— Mark Twain

We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

— Mark Twain

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

— Mark Twain

All say, How hard it is that we have to die -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

— Mark Twain

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

— Mark Twain

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

— Mark Twain

I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.

— Mark Twain

I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.

— Mark Twain

It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.

— Mark Twain

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first -- that is the idea.

— Mark Twain

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

— Mark Twain

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.

— Mark Twain

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

— Mark Twain

Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty --the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

— Mark Twain

Do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.

— Mark Twain

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

— Mark Twain

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

— Mark Twain

We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?

— Mark Twain

The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

— Mark Twain

Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.

— Mark Twain

We are all alike, on the inside.

— Mark Twain

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

— Mark Twain

I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.

— Mark Twain

There is nothing so annoying as a good example!!

— Mark Twain

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

— Mark Twain

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

— Mark Twain