1. I don’t like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell, you see, I have friends in both places.

- Mark Twain

2. The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.

- Mark Twain

3. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

- Mark Twain

4. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

- Mark Twain

5. 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.

- Mark Twain

6. I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

- Mark Twain

7. 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.

- Mark Twain

8. An honest politician is an oxymoron.

- Mark Twain

9. Right is right, and wrong is wrong, and a body ain’t got no business doing wrong when he ain’t ignorant and knows better.

- Mark Twain

10. Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable.

- Mark Twain

11. I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in turn, seems the loveliest.

- Mark Twain

12. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

- Mark Twain

13. It is higher and nobler to be kind.

- Mark Twain

14. Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

- Mark Twain

15. There’s one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he’s crooked.

- Mark Twain

16. A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn’t.

- Mark Twain

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

- Mark Twain

18. I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.

- Mark Twain

19. When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.

- Mark Twain

20. Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

- Mark Twain

21. When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

- Mark Twain

22. Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.

- Mark Twain

23. The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

- Mark Twain

24. 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.

- Mark Twain

25. There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.

- Mark Twain

26. Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

- Mark Twain

27. Never be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty.

- Mark Twain

28. The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.

- Mark Twain

29. Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?

- Mark Twain

30. Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.

- Mark Twain

31. A man’s character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

- Mark Twain

32. 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.

- Mark Twain

33. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

- Mark Twain

34. 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.

- Mark Twain

35. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

- Mark Twain

36. When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

- Mark Twain

37. I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!

- Mark Twain

38. Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do.

- Mark Twain

39. Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

- Mark Twain

40. The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.

- Mark Twain

41. In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

- Mark Twain

42. Human pride is not worthwhile; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it.

- Mark Twain

43. Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain’t that a big enough majority in any town?

- Mark Twain

44. Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.

- Mark Twain

45. Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

- Mark Twain

46. A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

- Mark Twain

47. Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.

- Mark Twain

48. One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

- Mark Twain

49. Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

- Mark Twain

50. The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.

- Mark Twain

51. Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.

- Mark Twain

52. To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.

- Mark Twain

53. There is nothing so annoying as having two people talking when you’re busy interrupting.

- Mark Twain

54. Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

- Mark Twain

55. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

- Mark Twain

56. The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.

- Mark Twain

57. One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke.

- Mark Twain

58. 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.

- Mark Twain

59. A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.

- Mark Twain

60. There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

- Mark Twain

61. Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.

- Mark Twain

62. Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.

- Mark Twain

63. He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather.

- Mark Twain

64. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

- Mark Twain

65. The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.

- Mark Twain

66. Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

- Mark Twain

67. It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

- Mark Twain

68. The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.

- Mark Twain

69. 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.

- Mark Twain

70. It’s not the good that die young, it’s the lucky.

- Mark Twain

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

- Mark Twain

72. I couldn’t bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn’t think about nothing else.

- Mark Twain

73. You can’t reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.

- Mark Twain

74. Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.

- Mark Twain

75. But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

- Mark Twain

76. I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel they have not said enough.

- Mark Twain

77. Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

- Mark Twain

78. When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.

- Mark Twain

79. Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

- Mark Twain

80. Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.

- Mark Twain

81. Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

- Mark Twain

82. How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.

- Mark Twain

83. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.

- Mark Twain

84. The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.

- Mark Twain

85. Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.

- Mark Twain

86. When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.

- Mark Twain

87. Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation.

- Mark Twain

88. Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.

- Mark Twain

89. Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

- Mark Twain

90. There are three things men can do with women: love them, suffer them, or turn them into literature.

- Mark Twain

91. My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.

- Mark Twain

92. April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

- Mark Twain

93. All right, then, I’ll go to hell.

- Mark Twain

94. 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?

- Mark Twain

95. Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep ’til noon.

- Mark Twain

96. The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.

- Mark Twain

97. If everyone was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes.

- Mark Twain

98. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it, namely, that, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

- Mark Twain

99. Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.

- Mark Twain

100. If a person offends you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance, and hit him with a brick.

- Mark Twain

101. Ah, if he could only die temporarily!

- Mark Twain

102. Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

- Mark Twain

103. Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.

- Mark Twain

104. Use the right word, not its second cousin.

- Mark Twain

105. 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.

- Mark Twain

106. The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.

- Mark Twain

107. Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.

- Mark Twain

108. If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.

- Mark Twain

109. It’s easy to make friends, but hard to get rid of them.

- Mark Twain

110. 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.

- Mark Twain

111. All I care to know about a man is that he is a human being… he can’t be any worse.

- Mark Twain

112. Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

- Mark Twain

113. To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.

- Mark Twain

114. The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.

- Mark Twain

115. Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!

- Mark Twain

116. I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.

- Mark Twain

117. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

- Mark Twain

118. It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt.

- Mark Twain

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

- Mark Twain

120. 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.

- Mark Twain

121. I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.

- Mark Twain

122. That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.

- Mark Twain

123. Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.

- Mark Twain

124. 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.

- Mark Twain

125. When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn.

- Mark Twain

126. I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.

- Mark Twain

127. Familiarity breeds contempt and children.

- Mark Twain

128. 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.

- Mark Twain

129. 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.

- Mark Twain

130. Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

- Mark Twain

131. Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.

- Mark Twain

132. 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.

- Mark Twain

133. What would men be without women? Scarce, sir…mighty scarce.

- Mark Twain

134. Be good and you will be lonesome.

- Mark Twain

135. Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.

- Mark Twain

136. It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.

- Mark Twain

137. The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.

- Mark Twain

138. 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.

- Mark Twain

139. 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.

- Mark Twain

140. Just when I thought I was learning how to live, ’twas then I realized I was learning how to die.

- Mark Twain

141. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

- Mark Twain

142. 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.

- Mark Twain

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

- Mark Twain

144. Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

- Mark Twain

145. Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.

- Mark Twain

146. Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

- Mark Twain

147. 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.

- Mark Twain

148. Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

- Mark Twain

149. 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.

- Mark Twain

150. The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible.

- Mark Twain

151. 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.

- Mark Twain

152. The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

- Mark Twain

153. Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

- Mark Twain

154. Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.

- Mark Twain

155. The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.

- Mark Twain

156. Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

- Mark Twain

157. If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare.

- Mark Twain

158. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

- Mark Twain

159. It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.

- Mark Twain

160. 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.

- Mark Twain

161. Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.

- Mark Twain

162. The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

- Mark Twain

163. I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can’t go beyond possibility.

- Mark Twain

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

- Mark Twain

165. If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.

- Mark Twain

166. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).

- Mark Twain

167. A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.

- Mark Twain

168. Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

- Mark Twain

169. Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

- Mark Twain

170. 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.

- Mark Twain

171. If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.

- Mark Twain

172. If you don’t like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes.

- Mark Twain

173. The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.

- Mark Twain

174. I do not like work even when someone else is doing it.

- Mark Twain

175. High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

- Mark Twain

176. 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.

- Mark Twain

177. Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.

- Mark Twain

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

- Mark Twain

179. December is the toughest month of the year. Others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, October, August, and February.

- Mark Twain