Mark Twain
It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.Collection: Death
A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.Collection: Death
We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.Collection: Freedom
But that's always the way; it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yaller dog that didn't know no more than a person's conscience does I would pison him. It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow.Collection: Dog
We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them.Collection: Life
I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.Collection: War
My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.Collection: German Language
If I can capture truth in its simplest form, beauty will follow like a sledgehammer.Collection: Form
Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And today, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy and fall down and worship it!Collection: Fall
An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect.Collection: Friendship
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.Collection: Funny
Crowds stand around all day long and criticise that bridge, and find fault with it, and tell with unlimited frankness how it ought to have been planned, and how they would have built it had the city granted them the $14,000 it cost. It is really refreshing to hang around these and listen to them. A foreigner would come to the conclusion that all America was composed of inspired professional bridge builders.Collection: Bridges
All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.Collection: Education
I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.Collection: Thinking
He gossips habitually; he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue.Collection: Men
I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary.Collection: Art
I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!Collection: Forgiveness
I was armed to the teeth with a pitiful little Smith & Wesson's seven-shooter, which carried a ball like a homopathic pill, and it took the whole seven to make a dose for an adult. But I thought it was grand. It appeared to me to be a dangerous weapon. It had only one fault - you could not hit anything with it.Collection: Faults
Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!Collection: Together
When you catch an adjective, kill it.Collection: Writing
All I say is, kings is kings, and you got to make allowances. Take them all around, they're a mighty ornery lot. It's the way they're raised.Collection: Kings
Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head.Collection: Heart
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.Collection: Inspirational
I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing.Collection: Clothes
A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.Collection: Funny
I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.Collection: Book
Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are most economical in its use.Collection: Inspirational
Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.Collection: Laughter
A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.Collection: Food
an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.Collection: Book
Life is short. Forgive quickly, kiss slowly and love truly.Collection: Life Is Short
You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it.Collection: Grateful
Love is madness, if thwarted it develops fast.Collection: Love
Your road is everything that a road ought to be...and yet you will not stay in it half a mile, for the reason that little, seductive, mysterious roads are always branching out from it on either hand, and as these curve sharply also and hide what is beyond, you cannot resist the temptation to desert your own chosen path and explore them.Collection: Curves
Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Don't be fooled by this absurd law; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him.Collection: Horse
It{California} is the land where the fabled Aladdin's Lamp lies buried-and she {San Francisco} is the new Aladdin who shall seize it from its obscurity and summon the genie and command him to crown her with power and greatness and bring to her feet the hoarded treasures of the earth.Collection: Lying
Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience; multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal.Collection: Christian
There has been much tragedy in my life; at least half of it actually happened.Collection: Inspirational
We were good boys, good Presbyterian boys, and loyal and all that; anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold.Collection: Boys
There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1, to tell him you have read one of his books; 2, to tell him you have read all of his books; 3, to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.Collection: Book
The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world'd luxuries, king by grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.Collection: Kings
You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.Collection: Men
there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associationsCollection: Teaching
I was educated, I was trained, I was a Presbyterian and I knew how these things are done. I knew that in Biblical times if a man committed a sin the extermination of the whole surrounding nation-cattle and all-was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after.Collection: Biblical
April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.Collection: Funny
In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies; the domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals, its princes of Monaco and its stonemasons of Cromarty meeting, barren of man-made gauds and meretricious decorations, upon the one majestic level!Collection: Brother
A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can't travel any way but sideways and backways.Collection: Country
After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.Collection: Dream
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. We have two opinions: one private, which we are afraid to express; and another one - the one we use - which we force ourselves to wear to please Mrs. Grundy, until habit makes us comfortable in it, and the custom of defending it presently makes us love it, adore it, and forget how pitifully we came by it. Look at it in politics.Collection: Love