Mark Twain Quotes

2194 quotes in 13158 categories

• Look at you in war...There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war.
• The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing…
• I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.
• We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches…
• We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.
• Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days…
• New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug…
• A new oath holds pretty well; but... when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retryings of its remains,…
• His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine.
• Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.
• The law of work seems unfair, but nothing can change it; the more enjoyment you get out of your work, the more money you will…
• Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But…
• He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that.
• The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work.
• The world doesn't owe you anything. It was here first.
• He gossips habitually; he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue.
• Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly…
• Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
• Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
• Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.

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