Mark Twain, Собрание сочинений в восьми томах Quotes

I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.

A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.

A soiled baby with a neglected nose cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty.

Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization-one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?

There was a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in.

It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.

Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.

All gods are better than their reputation.

When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.

It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.

A wanton waste of projectiles.

It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden

His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.

I was born with Halley's Comet and I expect to die upon its return

When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.

Yes - en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'.

Humor is tragedy plus time.

Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics.

I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.

To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master.

The trouble with most of us is that we know too much that ain't so.

I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like.

Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation.

You can't reason someone out of something that they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes

Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow.

When congress is in session no American is safe.

In my experience, previously counted chickens never do hatch.

Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother's path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard.

The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.

The problem with education is school.

A German joke is no laughing matter.

And how moving is the eloquence of the untaught when it is the heart that is speaking!

Seventy is old enough. After that there is too much risk.

When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss.

Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far.

America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.

To eat is human, to digest, divine

The more I know people, the more I love my dog.

Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?

What is the chief end of man?-to get rich. In what way?-dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must.

The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else.

We Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world.

You can't pray a lie -- I found that out.

Put no trust in the benefits to accrue from early rising, as set forth by the infatuated Franklin.

In literature imitations do not imitate.

Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.

To do right is wonderful. To teach others to do right is even more wonderful--and much easier.