Mark Twain Quotes

"It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race"

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

"Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so"

"When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved"

"One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it - they also believed the world was flat"

"If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him."

"We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things and yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy for us"

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

"Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man"

"Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."

"Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. Modesty died when clothes were born. Modesty died when false modesty was born."

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

"The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or the scenery, but in the talking."

"In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer."

"The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong"

"When I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built."

"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."

"Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment."

"When a man is known to have no settled convictions of his own he can't convict other people"

"He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person"