Mark Twain, Собрание сочинений в восьми томах Quotes

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.

Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness.

I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!

Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.

When you feel like tellin a feller to go to the devil - tell him to go to Chicago - it'll anser every purpose, and is perhaps, a leetle more expensive.

Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffer, not the state.

Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.

I make it a rule never to smoke while I'm sleeping.

We Americans are the most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.

The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work.

The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.

Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion

What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth.

When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable.

We must put up with clothes as they are they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us to advertise what we wear them to conceal.

Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth

You cannot have all chiefs; you gotta have Indians too. Perfect love cannot be without equality. A friend to everybody and to nobody is the same thing. We are all alike, on the inside.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there.

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.

Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand

The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.

The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race's steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit's way - the optimist's way.

I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast-but for luncheon-for dinner- for tea-for supper-for between meals.

When an audience does not complain, it is a compliment, and when it does, it is a compliment, too, if unaccompanied by violence.

It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.

[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.

If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.

The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.

Is a person's public and private opinion the same? It is thought there have been instances.

No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests.

Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money off them.

It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient.

When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.

We despise no source that can pay us a pleasing attention.

A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart.

The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight -- this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one -- this is business.

If you must be indiscrete, be discrete in your indiscretion.

All scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm.

The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.

I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says - "Yes; the little ones does".

A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it.

Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!

It's not as bad as it sounds.

Human beings are the only creatures who blush - or who need to.

There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.

If the metrics you are looking at aren't useful in optimizing your strategy - stop looking at them.