1. “A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.”
2. “A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.”
3. “A classic is a book which people praise and don't read."
4. "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read."
5. “Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
6. “Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don't mind, it doesn't matter.”
7. “A good lie will have travled half way around the world while the truth is putting on her boots.”
8. ”A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
9. "All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.”
10. “All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.”
11. ”A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn no other way.”
12. “A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds.”
13. “Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”
14. “Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
15. ”A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”
16. “A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be lead by the nose.”
17. “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born - a hundred million years - and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity, and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.”
18. “Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.”
19. “A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling by Mark Twain (1835-1910). For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.”
20. “A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”
21. “A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.”
22. "Be careful of reading health books, you might die of a misprint."
23. “"Be Yourself" is about the worst advice you can give to people.”
24. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views can not be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth.”
25. "By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean."
26. “By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward - you will never get her full confidence again.”
27. “Cats are loose in their morals, but not consciously so. Man, in his descent from the cat, has brought the cat's looseness with him but has left the unconsciousness behind -- the saving grace which excuses the cat. The cat is innocent, man is not.”
28. “Cats are packed full of music -- just as full as they can hold; and when they die, people remove it from them and sell it to the fiddle-makers.”
29. "Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities."
30. “Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.”
31. “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
32. “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear; not absence of fear.”
33. "Dance like no one is watching.Sing like no one is listening.Love like you've never been hurtand live like it's heaven on Earth."
34. ”Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
35. "Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
36. “Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.”
37. "Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.”
38. “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”
39. “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
40. “Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold.”
41. “Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.”
42. “Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
43. “Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.”
44. “Get your facts first and then you can distort them as much as you wish.”
45. "Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person."
46. ”Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this it the ideal life.”
47. “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”
48. “Happiness ain't a thing in itself -- it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.... And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.”
49. “Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
50. “History may not repeat itself, but it does rhyme a lot.”
51. “Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.”
52. "I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way."
53. “I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.”
54. “I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.”
55. ”I can live for two months on a good compliment.” ‘
56. “I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.”
57. “I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
58. “I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.”
59. ”I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.”
60. ”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.”
61. “If a man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”
62. “I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.”
63. “I find that the further I go back, the better things, whether they happened or not.”
64. “If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.”
65. “If we hadn't our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries-the ice-storm: when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top -- ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice-beads, frozen dew-drops, and the whole tree sparkles cold and white, like the Shah of Persia's diamond plume. Then the wind waves the branches and the sun comes out and turns all those myriads of beads and drops to prisms that glow and burn and flash with all manner of colored fires, which change and change again with inconceivable rapidity from blue to red, from red to green, and green to gold-the tree becomes a spraying fountain, a very explosion of dazzling jewels; and it stands there the acme, the climax, the supremest possibility in art or nature, of bewildering, intoxicating, intolerable magnificence. One cannot make the words too strong.”
66. "If we were supposed to talk more than we listen, then we would have two mouths and only one ear."
67. “If you have nothing to say, say nothing.”
68. "If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them -- you can't help it; and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea."
69. “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 a man.”
70. “If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.”
71. ”Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.”
72. “I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.”
73. ”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.”
74. "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."
75. “I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.”
76. “I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.”
77. “I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again.”
78. “I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.”
79. “Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity -- these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing; they are not ashamed. Man, with his soiled mind, covers himself. ...Man is the Animal that Blushes. He is the only one that does it -- or has occasion to.”
80. “I never could tell a lie that anybody would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.”
81. “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.”
82. “In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has.”
83. “I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.”
84. "I thoroughly disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise and I know they are dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me now I would go to that man and take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot and kill him."
85. “It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.”
86. “It is discouraging to try and penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.”
87. “It is easier to manufacture seven facts out of whole cloth than one emotion.”
88. “It is not best that we should all think alike; it is differences of opinion that make horse races.”
89. ”It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.”
90. ”It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.”
91. “I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.”
92. “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.”
93. “Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.”
94. “Let us be thankful for fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.”
95. “Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now.”
96. “Let us not be too particular: it is better to have old second hand diamonds than none at all.”
97. “Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.”
98. “Love your enemy, it will scare the hell out of them.”
99. “Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion- several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight.”
100. ”Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out... and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel.... And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" - with his mouth.”
101. “Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.”
102. "Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied."
103. “Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.”
104. “Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race -- the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions.”
105. “My books are water; those of the great geniuses are wine -- everybody drinks water.”
106. “Never let formal education get in the way of your learning.”
107. ”Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.”
108. ”Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
109. ”October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.”
110. “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.”
111. “Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.”
112. “Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.”
113. "One learns people through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect."
114. “One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity there ain't nothing can beat teamwork.”
115. “Our civilization is wonderful, in certain spectacular and meretricious ways; wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material inflation, which it calls advancement, progress, and other pet names; wonderful in its spying-out of the deep secrets of Nature and its vanquishment of her stubborn laws; wonderful in its extraordinary financial and commercial achievements; wonderful in its hunger for money, and in its indifference as to how it is acquired; wonderful in the hitherto undreamed-of magnitude of its private fortunes and the prodigal fashion in which they are given away to institutions devoted to the public culture; wonderful in its exhibitions of poverty; wonderful in the surprises which it gets out of that great new birth, Organization, the latest and most potent creation and miracle-worker of the commercialized intellect, as applied in transportation systems, in manufactures, in systems of communication, in news-gathering, book-publishing, journalism; in protecting labor; in oppressing labor; in herding the national parties and keeping the sheep docile and usable; in closing the public service against brains and character; in electing purchasable legislatures, blatherskike Congresses, and city governments which rob the town and sell municipal protection to gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and professional seducers for cash. It is a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance-dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place.”
116. “Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.”
117. “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
118. “Put all your eggs in the one basket and- WATCH THAT BASKET.”
119. "Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself."
120. ”Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.”
121. “Sacred cows make the best hamburger.”
122. “Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane -- like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell -- mouths mercy and invented hell -- mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him!”
123. ”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.”
124. ”Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah... didn't miss the boat.”
125. “Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.”
126. “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.”
127. “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.”
128. “The holy passion of friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.”
129. “The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.”
130. “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 and the witty upon the matter.”
131. “The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury.”
132. "The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them."
133. “The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.”
134. “The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
135. “The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence, which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.”
136. “...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!”
137. “The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all.”
138. “The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.”
139. “There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one--keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.”
140. "There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground year after year and will not be persuaded. It isn't because the book is not there and worth being written -- it is only because the right form of the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself."
141. “There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others.”
142. “There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.”
143. "There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure."
144. “There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.”
145. “There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -- a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”
146. “There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.”
147. “There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angelship.”
148. “There is nothing you can say in answer to a compliment. I have been complimented myself a great many times, and they always embarrass me - I always feel that they have not said enough.”
149. “There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
150. "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."
151. “The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”
152. “The secret of success is to make your vocation your vacation.”
153. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”
154. “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so.”
155. “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.”
156. “This is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature, and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.”
157. “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightning that does the work.”
158. “They spell it "da Vinci" and pronounce it "da Vinchy". Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.”
159. “Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.”
160. "Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education."
161. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.”
162. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
163. “Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”
164. “We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.
165. “We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.”
166. “We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.”
167. "We had the stars up there," said Huck, "And we use to lie on our backs and look up at them and discuss 'bout whether they was made or just happened. Jim he allowed that the stars was made, but I allowed they just happened. Jim said the Moon could'a laid them; Well, that looked kind of reasonable so I didn't say nothing against it. I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done."
168. “We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.”
169. “We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.”
170. ”We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.”
171. ”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 either.”
172. “What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows - it must grow; nothing can prevent it.”
173. ”When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.”
174. “When in doubt, tell the truth.”
175. “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.”
176. "When one has tasted watermelon he knows what the angels eat."
177. “When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
178. “When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.”
179. “When you cannot get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.”
180. “Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.”
181. “Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.”
182. “Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction after all, has to make sense.”
183. “Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.”
184. “Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.”
185. “You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
186. "You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs."
187. “You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear.”
