Wednesday, October 06, 2004

Mark Twain

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

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