257 quotes
When in doubt, tell the truth.
Following the Equator (1897)
Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick.
The glory which is built upon a lie soon becomes a most unpleasant incumbrance. … How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!
Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us? (1897)
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
God's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
None but the dead have free speech.
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.
Taming the Bicycle (1917)
There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (1897)
There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
Chorus
Punch, brothers! punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience — 4000 critics.
Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
He [George Washington Cable] has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.
A Jewish beggar is not impossible, perhaps; such a thing may exist, but there are few men that can say they have seen that spectacle.
Concerning the Jews (1899)
A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years.
A Tramp Abroad (1880)
France has usually been governed by prostitutes.
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more.
Modesty died when clothes were born.
Modesty died when false modesty was born.