Mark Twain, Собрание сочинений в восьми томах Quotes
There's something in it when a body like the widow or the parson prays, but it don't work for me, and I reckon it don't work for only just the right kind.
Writing is the easiest thing in the world.... Just try it sometime. I sit up with a pipe in my mouth and a board on my knees and I scribble away.
When you catch an adjective, kill it - perhaps the best possible advice for budding writers.
There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it, because if I'd know'd what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a tackled it.
The spirit of wrath - not the words - is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk.
Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog: Nobody really enjoys it, and the frog generally dies as a result.
It is an important thing, in our never-ending pursuit of happiness, to stop and just be happy for a while.
Being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be. It's just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time.
A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.
As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and ... Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.
If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error.
We like to read about rich people in the newspapers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed.
I thoroughly believe that any man who's got anything worthwhile to say will be heard if he only says it often enough.
The community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.
It is not a new thing for a thoroughly good and well-meaning preacher´s soft heart to run away with his soft head.
There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it.
If ever you've been down in the dumps, hear these iconic authors share with you more than their writing wisdom.
No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God--primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.
You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient 'people say.'
More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent.
