Quotes by Twain, Mark

"By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean."

Twain, Mark on adversity
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"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."

Twain, Mark on death
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"Why is it that we rejoice at birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."

Twain, Mark on death
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"Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world."

Twain, Mark on death
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"We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world."

Twain, Mark on death
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"We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier."

Twain, Mark on death
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"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."

Twain, Mark on death
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"All say, How hard it is that we have to die -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live."

Twain, Mark on death
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"When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people."

Twain, Mark on deception
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"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

Twain, Mark on deception
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"I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying."

Twain, Mark on democracy
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"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."

Twain, Mark on desire
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"It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death."

Twain, Mark on despair
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"What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first -- that is the idea."

Twain, Mark on discovery
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"The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."

Twain, Mark on dissent
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"He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals."

Twain, Mark on doctors
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"Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul."

Twain, Mark on dress
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"Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty --the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself."

Twain, Mark on duty
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"Do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain."

Twain, Mark on duty
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"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

Twain, Mark on education
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"Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education."

Twain, Mark on education
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"We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"

Twain, Mark on empire
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"The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity."

Twain, Mark on joy
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"Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied."

Twain, Mark on envy
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"We are all alike, on the inside."

Twain, Mark on equality
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"Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on The Survival of the Fittest. These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution."

Twain, Mark on evolution
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"I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey."

Twain, Mark on evolution
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"There is nothing so annoying as a good example!!"

Twain, Mark on example
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"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example."

Twain, Mark on example
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"I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting."

Twain, Mark on exercise
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"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 anymore."

Twain, Mark on experience
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"The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. But he won't sit upon a cold stove lid, either."

Twain, Mark on experience
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"Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please."

Twain, Mark on facts
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"Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

Twain, Mark on faith
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"It was the schoolboy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

Twain, Mark on faith
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"Familiarity breeds contempt; and children."

Twain, Mark on familiarity
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"We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly."

Twain, Mark on family
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"Adam was the luckiest man; he had no mother-in-law."

Twain, Mark on family
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"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."

Twain, Mark on fiction
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"He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that."

Twain, Mark on flowers
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