257 quotes
A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab and can't travel any way but sideways and backwards.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.
And God said, "A way must be conceived to pursue the dead beyond the tomb."
Letters From the Earth (1909)
You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
Words realize nothing, vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the thing which the words try to describe.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
Something that everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read.
Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.
Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940)
I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
The very "marks" on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy.
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
For a male person bric-a-brac hunting is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes.
Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire.
Following the Equator (1897)
The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
Christian Science (1907)