Famous Quotes from ...

Mark Twain

  • Sing like no one's listening, love like you've never been hurt, dance like nobody's watching, and live like its heaven on earth.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.... Mark Twain {view}
  • The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.... Mark Twain {view}
  • To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.... Mark Twain {view}
  • It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.... Mark Twain {view}
  • The first half of my life I went to school, the second half of my life I got an education.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.... Mark Twain {view}
  • When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.... Mark Twain {view}
  • What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it... Mark Twain {view}
  • Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen... Mark Twain {view}
  • Don't go around saying the world owes you a living; the world owes you nothing; it was here first... Mark Twain {view}
  • Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.... Mark Twain {view}
  • I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.... Mark Twain {view}
  • What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself... Mark Twain {view}
  • All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.... Mark Twain {view}
  • 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... Mark Twain {view}
  • Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear... Mark Twain {view}
  • If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside... Mark Twain {view}
  • There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.... Mark Twain {view}
  • It is curious - curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare... Mark Twain {view}
  • There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure... Mark Twain {view}
  • All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Let us endeavor to live so that when we die even the undertaker will be sorry... Mark Twain {view}
  • It is a pity that we cannot escape from life when we are young.... Mark Twain {view}
  • We can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Virtue has never been as respectable as money... Mark Twain {view}
  • When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.... Mark Twain {view}
  • There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.... Mark Twain {view}
  • We have the best government that money can buy.... Mark Twain {view}
  • The government is merely a servant -- merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd have frozen to death.... Mark Twain {view}
  • It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and undeservedly succeed when the informed and experienced fail.... Mark Twain {view}
  • If readers recognized that he was an ass, unaware of his own stupidity, ''your work will be a triumph.... Mark Twain {view}
  • You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.... Mark Twain {view}
  • If they had not landed there would be some reason for celebrating the fact.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more.... Mark Twain {view}
  • The funerals of these, ... do not occur often enough.... Mark Twain {view}
  • One of my theories is that the hearts of men are about alike, no matter what their skin color.... Mark Twain {view}
  • When some men discharge an obligation you can hear the report for miles around... Mark Twain {view}
  • To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals... Mark Twain {view}
  • Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it... Mark Twain {view}
  • One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare... Mark Twain {view}
  • Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives and obscene stories... Mark Twain {view}
  • I'll take Heaven for the climate and Hell for society.... Mark Twain {view}
  • 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... Mark Twain {view}
  • There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail... Mark Twain {view}
  • All good things arrive unto them that wait - and don't die in the meantime... Mark Twain {view}
  • Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.... Mark Twain {view}
  • When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval - a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death... Mark Twain {view}
  • 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.... Mark Twain {view}
  • It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Heroine: girl who is perfectly charming to live with, in a book.... Mark Twain {view}
  • A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it... Mark Twain {view}
  • The Autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze... Mark Twain {view}
  • My experience with Providence has not been of a nature to give me great confidence in his judgment, and I consider that my wife crept in while his attention was occupied elsewhere... Mark Twain {view}
  • Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand... Mark Twain {view}
  • A thoroughly beautiful woman and a thoroughly homely woman are creations which I love to gaze upon, and which I cannot tire of gazing upon, for each is perfect in her own line... Mark Twain {view}
  • When red-haired people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn... Mark Twain {view}
  • Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value... Mark Twain {view}
  • Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.... Mark Twain {view}
  • I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast.... Mark Twain {view}
  • The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds... Mark Twain {view}
  • Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is wrong. There is no other time.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Don't let schooling interfere with your education.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.... Mark Twain {view}
  • I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society.... Mark Twain {view}
  • The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of ungraceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghastly stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.... Mark Twain {view}
  • After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.... Mark Twain {view}
  • A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is just about as inspiring.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Its not true that men forget theyre married when they see a pretty woman. Just the opposite, thats when theyre most painfully reminded of it.... Mark Twain {view}
  • We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for ''political influence.'' We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. ''Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?''... Mark Twain {view}
  • The partitions of the houses were so thin we could hear the women occupants of adjoining rooms changing their minds.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritation and resentments slip away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Such a laugh was money in a man's pocket, because it cut down on the doctor's bills like everything.... Mark Twain {view}
  • I never let schooling interfere with my education.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.... Mark Twain {view}
  • Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not bet... Mark Twain {view}
  • I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's... Mark Twain {view}
  • By the etiquette of war, it is permitted to none below the rank of newspaper correspondent to dictate to the general in the field... Mark Twain {view}
  • A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words... the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.... Mark Twain {view}
  • When a man's dog turns against him it is time for a wife to pack her trunk and go home to mama... Mark Twain {view}
  • Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress and some would lose all of it.... Mark Twain {view}
  • If all men were rich, all men would be poor... Mark Twain {view}
  • Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.... Mark Twain {view}
  • It's a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there... Mark Twain {view}
  • Heaven for climate, hell for society.... Mark Twain {view}
  • The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny... Mark Twain {view}
  • Really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.... Mark Twain {view}
  • The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong... Mark Twain {view}
  • Make money and the whole world will conspire to call you a gentleman.... Mark Twain {view}
  • If you think knowledge is dangerous, try ignorance... Mark Twain {view}
  • Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold... Mark Twain {view}
  • As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized!... Mark Twain {view}