Quotes from Mark Twain

The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but the fly comes close.

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.

Let us swear while we may, for in heaven it will not be allowed

Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'

I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.

How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hand.

The funniest things are the forbidden.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong. He can swear and still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way.

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.

Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.

I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

...there isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

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

I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity – another man's, I mean.

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment

Don't live in the past, don't ponder about the future, stay at the PRESENT moment NOW...always.

Heroine: Girl in a book who is saved from drowning by a hero and marries him next week, but if it was to be over again ten years later it is likely she would rather have a life-belt and he would rather have her have it