257 quotes
Familiarity breeds contempt — and children.
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
The funniest things are the forbidden.
Say the report is exaggerated.
The two Great Unknowns, the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities! They are the best known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet. (The Devil and Shakespeare).
Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the State die? Oh no.
Osteopathy (1901)
Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Draft manuscript (1881)
He was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
Honesty is the best policy — when there is money in it.
Speech to Eastman College (1901)
Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
Following the Equator (1897)
Try as you may, you don't get down as you would from a horse, you get down as you would from a house afire. You make a spectacle of yourself every time.
Taming the Bicycle (1917)
Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
There isn't time--so brief is life--for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving--and but an instant, so to speak, for that.
Letter to Clara Spaulding (1886)
Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)
He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man — and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.
Statement (1906)
The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life.
Letters from the Earth (1909)
Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.
The Gorky Incident (1906)
I started out alone to seek adventures. You don't really have to seek them—that is nothing but a phrase—they come to you.
Taming the Bicycle (1917)
Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples — that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.