Mark Twain Quotes & Sayings

“What would men be without women? Scarce, sir...mighty scarce.”

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.”

“It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.”

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.”

“In certain trying, urgent, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.”

“Some people give their problems swimming lessons instead of drowning them.”

“The man who does not read books has no advantage over the one who cannot read them.”

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”

“In order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.”

“Buy land, they're not making it anymore.”

“But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

“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.”

“There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good, it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones, it can lift men to angelship.”

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience — this is the ideal life.”

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

“What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.”

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”

“Turn knowledge into an advantage — use these life lessons.”

“There are not enough morally brave men in stock; we are out of moral courage material.”

“In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”

“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.”

“Always acknowledge fault frankly; it will throw those in authority off guard and give you an opportunity to make a choice.”

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