Mark Twain, Собрание сочинений в восьми томах Quotes

I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.

The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.

[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology.

We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision true--humor.

Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments - notably those of the violin - but it seems to set a piano's teeth on edge.

I never write "metropolis" for seven cents when I can write "city" and get paid the same.

Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts.

We can achieve what we can conceive and believe.

A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.

There are three kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, and statisticians

Indeed, none but the Deity can tell what is good luck and what is bad before the returns are all in.

The only people that a bank will loan money to is the very people who don't need it.

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.

Homely truth is unpalatable.

Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!

Preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty.

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.

It is not worth while to strain one's self to tell the truth to people who habitually discount everything you tell them, whether it is true or isn't.

My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.

When your opinions start to coincide with those of the majority, it is time to reconsider your opinions.

Knowledge becomes wisdom only after it has been put to good use.

God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage

But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it.

The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.

The [Kodak is] the only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn't bribe.

Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.

Custom is petrification, nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.

France has usually been governed by prostitutes

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients - no, three, I think - yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.

If men bore children, there would only be one born in each family.

The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.

When a man's dog turns against hime, it is time for his wife to pack her trunk and go home to mamma.

From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one -- to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.

God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.

If I can capture truth in its simplest form, beauty will follow like a sledgehammer.

Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing.

An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect.

Humor is like a frog; if you dissect it, it dies.

Hotels are the only proper places for lecturers. When I am ill-natured I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel where I can ring up a domestic and give him a quarter and then break furniture over him.

Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.

I used to think my father was an idiot, until I turned twenty-one... Then I thought he was a genus.

If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.

You aim for the palace and get drowned in the sewer.

Those who say truth is stranger than fiction have wasted their time on poorly written fiction.

Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out.

Honest poverty is a gem that even a king might be proud to call his own - but I wish to sell out

I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.

Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case.

Perfect grammar - persistent, continuous, sustained - is the fourth dimension, so to speak; many have sought it, but none has found it.

We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.