Quotes by Mark Twain

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.

I followed the other Experiment around, yesterday afternoon, at a distance, to see what it might be for, if I could. But I was not able to make [it] out. I think it is a man. I had never seen a man, but it looked like one, and I feel sure that that is what it is. I realize that I feel more curiosity about it than about any of the other reptiles. If it is a reptile, and I suppose it is; for it has frowzy hair and blue eyes, and looks like a reptile. It has no hips; it tapers like a carrot; when it stands, it spreads itself apart like a derrick; so I think it is a reptile, though it may be architecture.

A womans intuition is better than a mans. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man.

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.

Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.

One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it;

That’s just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don’t want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain’t no disgrace.

I said it was a brutal thing.No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it,

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.

Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered — either by themselves or by others. But for the Civil War, Lincoln and Grant and Sherman and Sheridan would not have been discovered, nor have risen into notice.

Theres one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know hes crooked.

Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.

The best of all lost arts is honesty

For a little while, hope made a show of reviving-not with any reason to back it, but only because it is its nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age and familiarity with failure.

Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you cant cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue?

It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.

One must make allowances for a parental instinct that has been starving for twenty-five or thirty years. It is famished, it is crazed with hunger by that time, and will be entirely satisfied with anything that comes handy; its taste is atrophied, it cant tell mud cat from shad. A devil born to a young couple is measurably recognizable by them as a devil before long, but a devil adopted by an old couple is an angel to them, and remains so, through thick and thin.

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

A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.

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