Mark Twain
American writer and humorist, 1835-1910
47 quotes.
Quotes by Mark Twain
- Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
- Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.
- Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
- Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
- Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.
- Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it.
- Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word.
- Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an idea in somebody's head.
- Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
- Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
- Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by man, but coaxed downstairs, a step at a time.
- Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
- I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
- If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
- It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience.
- It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
- It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
- It is in the heart that the values lie. I wish I could make him understand that a loving heart is riches, and riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.
- Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
- Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
- Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
- Life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that are forever blowing through one's mind.
- Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
- Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
- The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
- The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
- The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
- The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.
- The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
- The secret of getting ahead is getting started.
- The timid man yearns for full value and asks a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.
- The world doesn’t owe you anything. It was here first.
- The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
- 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.
- Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
- To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
- Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
- Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
- Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
- We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.