Mark Twain, Собрание сочинений в восьми томах Quotes

Never argue with people who buy ink by the gallon.

A sin takes on a new and real terror when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out.

God has put something noble and good into every heart His hand created.

The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.

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

Broad, wholesome, charitable views .. can not be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth.

Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society.

Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once.

Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. That is where the true evil lies.

Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

Persons who think there is no such thing as luck good or bad are entitled to their opinion, although I think they ought to be shot for it.

It's an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.

I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.

My memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.

It is often the case that a man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one.

Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.

You can't no more teach what you ain't learned than you can come from where you ain't been.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly ofthe storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.

If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.

I'm all for prosperity. It's change I object to.

Let your joy be unconfined!

Whatever you say, say it with conviction

The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.

First catch your Boer, then kick him.

Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave.

Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do.

When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years.

Go to bed early, get up early-this is wise.

I try never to let my schooling get in the way of my education.

The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.

The ability to find solutions to life's challenges is what makes us grow as a person.

Unused talents gives you no advantage over someone who has no talent at all.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.

No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

All human rules are more or less idiotic.

The funniest things are the forbidden.

Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else.

A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all.

Begin with the determination to succeed and the work is half done already.

Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane.

Some things you can't find out; but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing: no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.

All right, then, I'll go to hell.