Mark Twain

Selected Quotes

• When in doubt, tell the truth.
  
  
• France has neither winter nor summer nor morals - apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.
• For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment.
• In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.
• Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
  
  
• Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven and hell, and I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.
• We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons.
• As a rule, we go about with masks, we go about looking honest, and we are able to conceal ourselves all through the day.
• The human race consists of the dangerously insane and such as are not.
  
  
• Humor is the good natured side of a truth.
• The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.
• The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas- it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.
• You can't depend on your judgement when your imagination is out of focus.
  
  
• The greatest of all inventors is called Accident.
• Grief can take care of itself, but to get full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
• Man is a figment of God's imagination.
• 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 a man.
  
  
• Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
• Man is a Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
• Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
• All of us contain Music and Truth, but most of us can't get it out.
  
  
• It was not best that we would all think alike; it is the difference of opinion that makes horse races.
• All good things arrive unto them that wait - and don't die in the meantime.
• Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion.
• A scientist will never show any kindness for a theory which he did not start himself.
  
  
• The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.
• What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
• Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
  
• A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be led by the nose.
  
  
• It is wiser to find out than suppose.
• Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
• I do not like work even when someone else does it.
  
• We write frankly and fearlessly but then we "modify" before we print.
  
  
• We ought never to do wrong when people are looking.
• The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

More about Samuel Langhorne Clemens