Mark Twain Quotes
Mark Twain Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Mark Twain quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Mark Twain. Share these quotations with your friends and family.
On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.
By Mark Twain
I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.
By Mark Twain
I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases
By Mark Twain
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession, but carrying a banner.
By Mark Twain
A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.
By Mark Twain
A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation.
By Mark Twain
Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment.
By Mark Twain
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
By Mark Twain
After a few months' acquaintance with European coffee, one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.
By Mark Twain
To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
By Mark Twain
I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive, finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house...The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it.
By Mark Twain
Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
By Mark Twain
...the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said 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. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!
By Mark Twain
A home without a cat--and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat--may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?
By Mark Twain
It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Business
By Mark Twain
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. Business
By Mark Twain
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who didn't know what fear was, we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.
By Mark Twain
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
By Mark Twain
When we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
By Mark Twain
The pepper-box: what a lovely little instrument. Once a man went so far as to pull the trigger, all bets were off. It might discharge one chamber, or two, or all might go. The only sure thing was that that there was no safe place to be but behind it.
By Mark Twain
If a person offends you, do not resort to extremes, simply watch your chance and hit him with a brick.
By Mark Twain
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.
By Mark Twain
Of all the creatures ever made, Man is the most detestable. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.
By Mark Twain
In studying the traits and dispositions of the so-called lower animals, and contrasting them with man's, I find the result humiliating to me.
By Mark Twain
I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't...The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
By Mark Twain