Quotes from Mark Twain

I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.

When a person has a poor ear for music he will flat and sharp right along without knowing it. He keeps near the tune, but it is not the tune. When a person has a poor ear for words, the result is a literary flatting and sharping; you perceive what he is intending to say, but you also perceive that he doesn't say it. This is Cooper.

All kings is mostly rapscallions.

The difference between the almost-right word & the right word is really a large matter—it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.

It is not best that we should all think alike it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.

I'll resk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.

I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes.

To be good is noble but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.

Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.

Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.

Baccarat is a game whereby the croupier gathers in money with a flexible sculling oar, then rakes it home. If I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed.

We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may.

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

Lord save us all from... a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!

My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its office-holders.

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.

It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term.