Quotes from Mark Twain

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance.

It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.

There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.

A new oath holds pretty well; but... when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retryings of its remains, it ceases to be serviceable; any little strain will snap it.

In my age, as in my youth, night brings me many a deep remorse. I realize that from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race — never quite sane in the night.

All religions issue bibles against him, and say most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

"Pilgrim's Progress," about a man that left his family it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary.

I have had a "call" to literature, of a low order—i.e. humorous. It is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit… seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God's creatures.

An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.

A great person is one who affects the younger generation by his positivity

A house without a cat, and a well-fed, well-petted, and properly revered cat, may be a perfect house, perhaps, but how can it prove its title --from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson

A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.

A man is accepted into church for what he believes--and turned out for what he knows.

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be led by the nose.

A man with a new idea is a crank -- until the idea succeeds.

A patriot is mocked, scorned and hated; yet when his cause succeeds, all men will join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

A person whom Mark had small regard for, said: Mark, I recently chanced to pass by your house. To which Mark dryly replied: And may you always continue to do so.

A verb has a hard enough time of it in this world when it is all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it a way over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German.

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principle one was that they escaped teething.

All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"--a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.