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Quotes from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — Mark Twain

1835–1910 United States

← All quotes by Mark Twain

7 quotes

Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and...Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

When you want to get revenge on a woman you don't kill her—bosh! you go for her looks. You slit her nostrils—you notch her ears like a sow!

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

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)

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod — and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

There was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing — and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Mark Twain (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.