100+ Mark Twain quotes on Love, Life, and Education
Looking for the best Mark Twain quotes? We’ve compiled a list of the top 100 most inspiring Mark Twain quotes on life, happiness, success and more.
Top 100+ Famous Mark Twain Quotes
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”
“When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
“The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself”
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”
“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
“Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
“I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.”
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.”
“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.”
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.”
“Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.”
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.”
“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”
“A good marriage is the union of the two good forgiveness”- Mark Twain funny life quotes.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.”
“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
“Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read.”
“The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.”
“Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.”
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”
“To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.”
“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”
“When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.”
“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”
“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”
“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”
“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.”
“I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
“Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.”
“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”
“Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.”
“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.”
“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.”
“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”
“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.”
“I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up!”
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
“You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”
“Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”
“I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.”
“The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.”
“God created war so that Americans would learn geography.”
“The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.”
“The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.”
“I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.”
“After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.”
“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. ”
“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”
“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
“The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter.”
“My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.”
“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’is the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”
“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”
“Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
“Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”
“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”
“Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.”
“If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.”
“The Bible has noble poetry in it… and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.”
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
“The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man’s.”
“Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”
“Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.”
“Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.”
“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
“Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”
“Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.”
“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”
“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.”
“I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.”
“There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.”
“It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.”
“If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.”
“There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”
“Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.”
“Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”
“In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.”
“Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”
“It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than open it and remove all doubt”
“Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one’s head.”
“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
“The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.”
“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”
“Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.”
“If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.”
“Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.”
“I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.”
“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”
“There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.”
“Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.”
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.”
“Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.”
“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.”
“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”
“Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.”
“Worrying is like paying a debt you don’t owe.”
“The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.”
“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”
“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
“Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.”
“Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?”
“A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful.”
“Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.”
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
“He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.”
“What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.”
“The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.”
“Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
“Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.”
“Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.”
“Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
“Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. ”
