Mark Twain Quotes

A selection of Mark Twain Quotes and quotations.

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, an American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer. He was best known for his novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Learn more about Mark Twain at Wikipedia.

1. A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
2. All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge.
3. Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.
4. Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on.
5. Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
6. Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
7. He will by and by convince himself that war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep that he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception. - "The Mysterious Stranger"
8. I do not read anything but history and biography.
9. I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell, you see, I have friends in both places.
10. I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of perceiving humor.
11. If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.
12. It is noble to teach oneself, it is still nobler to teach others.
13. Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone.
14. Man: a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.
15. No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
16. 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 about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
17. Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late.
18. Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption. - In Eruption
19. So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.
20. Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute, but they all worship money.
21. Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
22. We are all alike, on the inside.
23. What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
24. When a man's dog turns against him it is time for a wife to pack her trunk and go home to mama.
25. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

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