Mark Twain Quotes

Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages. . . . It's an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance. The last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

he would now have comprehended that work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that play consists of whaterver a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why construcing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill, is work, whilst rolling nine-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service that would turn it into work, then they would resign.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.

It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.

The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of Anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

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

An honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

Your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon—laughter. Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug,—push it a little—crowd it a little—weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.

Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement.

Also, to be fair, there is another word of praise due to this ship's library: it contains no copy of [Oliver Goldsmith's] The Vicar of Wakefield ... a book which is one long waste-pipe discharge of goody-goody puerilities and dreary moralities. . . .

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

There are some few people I respect and admire, but I don't think much of the species.

Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.