Mark Twain > Quotes

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
― Mark Twain

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
― Mark Twain

“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”
― Mark Twain

“If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.”
― Mark Twain

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”
― Mark Twain

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”
― Mark Twain

“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
― Mark Twain

“The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.”
― Mark Twain

“I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
― Mark Twain

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
― Mark Twain

“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
― Mark Twain

“Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.”
― Mark Twain

“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
― Mark Twain

“The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
― Mark Twain

“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.”
― Mark Twain

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. ”
― Mark Twain

“The secret to getting ahead is getting started.”
― Mark Twain

“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
― Mark Twain

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
― Mark Twain

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
― Mark Twain

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
― Mark Twain

“If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.”
― Mark Twain

“I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
― Mark Twain

“I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
― Mark Twain

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
― Mark Twain

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”
― Mark Twain

“Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”
― Mark Twain

“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
― Mark Twain