Mark Twain Quotes

A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people [the Filipinos] free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

الحرب هي قتل مجموعة من الأغراب الذين لا تشعر نحوهم بأي عداء،
ولو قابلتهم في ظروف أخرى لقدمت لهم العون أو طلبته منهم.

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.

The gentle reader will never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.

The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing—I used to be a good boy.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.

I was always heedless. I was born heedless; and therefore I was constantly, and quite unconsciously, committing breaches of the minor proprieties, which brought upon me humiliations which ought to have humiliated me but didn't, because I didn't know anything had happened.

I am persuaded that in Russia, Austria, and Germany nine-tenths of the hostility to the Jew comes from the average Christian's inability to compete successfully with the average Jew in business--in either straight business or the questionable sort.

I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.

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.

I haven't any right to criticize books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.