Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the "greatest humorist the United States has produced".
He is noted for his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), the latter of which has often been called "the Great American Novel".
Here are some of Mark Twain best quotes. Famous Sayings About Life and Love, Twain Quotations About Inspiration, Best Mark Twain Funny Quotes. Quotes About Life & Success.
Mark Twain Quotes and Sayings
If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.
Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.
Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!
Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.
Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
But who prays for Satan? Who in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
The secret to getting ahead is getting started.
Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.
It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter ― tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.
Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
"Classic" - A book which people praise and don't read.
I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.
It's better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.
Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.
Man is the only animal that blushes. or needs to.
Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.
The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.
My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.
A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.
The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.
The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.
The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.
When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.
The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.
Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.
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.
A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.
If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.
When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.
The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.
I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't.
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
Worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe.
Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.
All right, then, I'll go to hell.
Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.
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.
I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.
The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.
Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.
Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.
What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
Be good and you will be lonesome.
Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.
A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head.
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