Mark Twain Quotes

Definition of a classic — something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

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.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.

I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it.

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.

A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.

As I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious.

He [George Washington Cable] has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will.

Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does -- but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use.

We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

The funniest things are the forbidden.

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue, but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

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

The report of my death was an exaggeration.