Quotes from Mark Twain

I apologize for such a long letter - I didn't have time to write a short one.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.

Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.

Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.

Well, everybody does it that way, Huck. Tom, I am not everybody.

I do not like work even when someone else is doing it.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.

Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.

One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a women is, until after considerable acquaintance with her.

Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.

Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you's gwyne to git well agin.

To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.

If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Herodotus says, Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.

Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself. She gave that look, and carried it away to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.

How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.