Mark Twain Quotes

great people are those who make others feel that they, too, can become great.

As by the fire of experience, so by commission of crime, you learn real morals.

Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

We ought never to do wrong when people are looking.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No — that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don't read.

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

He had arrived at the point where presently the illusions would cease and he would have entered upon the realities of life, and God help the man that has arrived at that point.

To succeed in other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws.

The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story on the matter.

Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.

The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.