Quotes by Mark Twain

If you tell the truth, you dont have to remember anything.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.

The Bible has noble poetry in it... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

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

If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat wont sit on a hot stove again. That cat wont sit on a cold stove either. That cat just dont like stoves.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

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

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.

Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove!

Human nature is all alike.

Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.

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

But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a mans mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done.

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

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

I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother--her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich! . . . Jean lies yonder, I sit here; we are strangers under our own roof; we kissed hands good-by at this door last night--and it was forever, we never suspecting it. She lies there, and I sit here--writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzling the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. Seventy-four years ago twenty-four days. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?

But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.

Yes, King Edward VI lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them worthily.

I havent any right to criticize books, and I dont do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I cant 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.