Quotes by Mark Twain

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winters evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old peoples tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place.

Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it.

It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one—a modest, private affair, all to myself. I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot when I arrive—as follows:Radishes. Baked apples, with creamFried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs.American coffee, with real cream.American butter.Fried chicken, Southern style.Porter-house steak.Saratoga potatoes.Broiled chicken, American style.Hot biscuits, Southern style.Hot wheat-bread, Southern style.Hot buckwheat cakes.American toast. Clear maple syrup.Virginia bacon, broiled.Blue points, on the half shell.Cherry-stone clams.San Francisco mussels, steamed.Oyster soup. Clam Soup.Philadelphia Terapin soup.Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style.Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad.Baltimore perch.Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas.Lake trout, from Tahoe.Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans.Black bass from the Mississippi.American roast beef.Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style.Cranberry sauce. Celery.Roast wild turkey. Woodcock.Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore.Prairie liens, from Illinois.Missouri partridges, broiled.Possum. Coon.Boston bacon and beans.Bacon and greens, Southern style.Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips.Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus.Butter beans. Sweet potatoes.Lettuce. Succotash. String beans.Mashed potatoes. Catsup.Boiled potatoes, in their skins.New potatoes, minus the skins.Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot.Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes.Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper.Green corn, on the ear.Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style.Hot hoe-cake, Southern style.Hot egg-bread, Southern style.Hot light-bread, Southern style.Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk.Apple dumplings, with real cream.Apple pie. Apple fritters.Apple puffs, Southern style.Peach cobbler, Southern stylePeach pie. American mince pie.Pumpkin pie. Squash pie.All sorts of American pastry.Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way.Ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

It aint the parts of the Bible that I cant understand that bother me, its the parts that I do understand.

Wherever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as exceeding sore, and it came to pass, etc., and made things satisfactory again. And it came to pass was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.

Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. Theres a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you cant see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.(The Refuge of the Derelicts collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devils Race-Track: Mark Twains Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980)

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.

You will be more disappointed in life by the things that you do not do than by the things that you do.

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

I havent a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells.

If voting made any difference they wouldnt let us do it.

The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isnt. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.

No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.