Famous Mark Twain Quotes

"Work is a necessary evil to be avoided."


"You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus."


"Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense."


"When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not."


"There is no distinctly American criminal class - except Congress."


"There are lies, damned lies and statistics."


"Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired."


"Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."


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


"Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed."


"Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough."


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


"The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop."


"The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause."


"Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."


"Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen."


"It is easier to stay out than get out."


"It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand."


"Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own."


"I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up."


"Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever."


"Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it."


"God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board."


"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."


"Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven."


"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."


"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear."


"By trying we can easily endure adversity. Another man's, I mean."


On Soul: "Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul."


On Anger: "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured."


On Idea: "A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds."


"A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way."