Mark Twain
He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.Collection: Ties
You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.Collection: Book
There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.Collection: Summer
There is nothing so annoying as a good example!!Collection: Example
A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.Collection: Spiritual
There is in life only one moment and in eternity only one. It is so brief that it is represented by the fleeting of a luminous mote through the thin ray of sunlight - and it is visible but a fraction of a second. The moments that preceded it have been lived, are forgotten and are without value; the moments that have not been lived have no existence and will have no value except in the moment that each shall be lived. While you are asleep you are dead; and whether you stay dead an hour or a billion years the time to you is the same.Collection: Years
Architects cannot teach nature anything.Collection: Architecture
I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead--and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and they would be honest so much earlier.Collection: Death
Definite speech means clarity of mind.Collection: Mean
In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.Collection: Atheist
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.Collection: Truth
He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel; he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed-kind of a syndicate; and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that's left over.Collection: Dog
Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.Collection: Life
In religion, India is the only millionaire... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.Collection: Past
All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.Collection: Funny
Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.Collection: Inspiration
How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good.Collection: Regret
Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.Collection: Summer
Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.Collection: Reading Books
What is it that strikes a spark of humor from a man? It is the effort to throw off, to fight back the burden of grief that is laid on each one of us. In youth we don't feel it, but as we grow to manhood we find the burden on our shoulders. Humor? It is nature's effort to harmonize conditions. The further the pendulum swings out over woe the further it is bound to swing back over mirth.Collection: Grief
An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.Collection: New Orleans
July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown soCollection: Country
An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.Collection: Hair
Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly ofthe storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.Collection: Inspirational
Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.Collection: Wise
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.Collection: Math
Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million.Collection: Satan
I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.Collection: Men
The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all.Collection: Writing
I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet-I am inclined to expect one.Collection: Religious
The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.Collection: Biblical
[Patriotism] ...is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn't a foot of land in the world which doesn't represent the ousting and re-ousting of a longline of successive "owners" who each in turn, as "patriots" with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of "robbers" who came to steal it and did -- and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.Collection: Heart
There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.Collection: Travel
There has been only one Christian. They caught and curcified him-early.Collection: Christian
Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more.Collection: Fashion
To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn't rich.Collection: Men
If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.Collection: Self Esteem
As one boy said, 'I was thinking all these horrible thoughts about my parents when suddenly it hit me-if they're all that bad, how come I'm so wonderful'Collection: Inspiration
To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life.Collection: Long
Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.Collection: Music
The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.Collection: Sweet
When in doubt, tell the truth. That maxim I did invent, but never expected it to be applied to me. I did say, "When you are in doubt," but when I am in doubt myself I use more sagacity.Collection: Truth
I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.Collection: Science
The man who isn't a pessimist is a damned fool.Collection: Men
I'm all for prosperity. It's change I object to.Collection: Prosperity
God was left out of the Constitution but was furnished a front seat on the coins of the country.Collection: Country
You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself.Collection: Law
The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.Collection: Lying
Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.Collection: Blood