Quotes by Mark Twain

A home without a cat — and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat — may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.

What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!

She said all a body would have to do there [Heaven] was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.

Truth is stranger than fiction...

Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life.

I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

NOTICEPersons 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.BY ORDER OF THE AUTHORPer G.G.,Chief of Ordnance

A few fly bites cannot stop a spirited horse.

I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

But that is the way we are made: we dont reason, where we feel; we just feel.

And what does it amount to? said Satan, with his evil chuckle. Nothing at all. You gain nothing; you always come out where you went in. For a million years the race has gone on monotonously propagating itself and monotonously reperforming this dull nonsense--to what end? No wisdom can guess! Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you; would feel defiled if you touched them; would shut the door in your face if you proposed to call; whom you slave for, fight for, die for, and are not ashamed of it, but proud; whose existence is a perpetual insult to you and you are afraid to resent it; who are mendicants supported by your alms, yet assume toward you the airs of benefactor toward beggar; who address you in the language of master to slave, and are answered in the language of slave to master; who are worshiped by you with your mouth, while in your heart--if you have one--you despise yourselves for it. The first man was a hypocrite and a coward, qualities which have not yet failed in his line; it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built.

The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, theres no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.

Looking his last upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing she could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips.

There isn’t a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights.

We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away.

My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror.

Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and lets go on trying.

Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed – because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays.