I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being–that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.
~ in Harper Magazine, Sept. 1899
There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce.
~ in the New York Tribune, Sept. 27, 1871
Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is a sort of low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time his is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the “noblest work of God.”
~ in Letters from the Earth
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
~ in Following the Equator
It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you: the one to slander you, and the other to get the news to you.
~ in Following the Equator
There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.
~ in Following the Equator
How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.
~ in The Diaries of Adam and Eve
I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
~ quoted by Frank Luntz in Words That Work
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader’s way and makes it plain. A close approximation to it will answer, and much traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do not welcome it and rejoice in it as we do when the right word blazes out at us. Whenever we come upon one of these intensely right words in a book or a newspaper, the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt. It tingles exquisitely around through the walls of the mouth and tastes as tart and crisp and good as the autumn butter that creams the sumac berry.
A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it.
Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.
Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.
‘Classic’ – a book which people praise and don’t read.
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
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.
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Go to heaven for the climate, hell for the company.
Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.
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 have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won’t.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
If you tell the truth you don’t have to remember anything.
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
In religion and politics, people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.
In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
It is easier to stay out than get out.
It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
It’s easy to give up smoking; I’ve done it many times.
It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
It’s not what I don’t understand about the Bible that bothers me; it’s what I do understand that bothers me.
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
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.
Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand.
My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.
Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.
Only presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms ought to have the right to use the editorial we.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
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 human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable, and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.
There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Time cools, time clarifies; no mood can be maintained quite unaltered through the course of hours.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.
Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
When in doubt tell the truth.
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them–then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart.
Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.
A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.
Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
Man is the only blushing animal—and the only one that needs to.
__________
Bibliography
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867)
General Washington’s Negro Body-Servant (1868)
My Late Senatorial Secretaryship (1868)
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
Memoranda (1870-1871)
Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance (1871)
Roughing It (1872)
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)
Sketches New and Old (1875)
Old Times on the Mississippi (1876)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage (1876)
A True Story and the Recent Carnival of Crime (1877)
The Invalid’s Story (1877)
Punch, Brothers, Punch! and other Sketches (1878)
A Tramp Abroad (1880)
1601: Conversation, as it was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors (1880)
The Prince and the Pauper (1882)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
The American Claimant (1892)
Merry Tales (1892)
Those Extraordinary Twins (1892)
The £1,000,000 Bank Note and Other New Stories (1893)
Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)
Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)
How to Tell a Story and other Essays (1897)
Following the Equator (1897)
Is He Dead? (1898)
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900)
A Salutation Speech From the Nineteenth Century to the Twentieth (1900)
The Battle Hymn of the Republic, Updated (1901)
Edmund Burke on Croker and Tammany (1901)
To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)
A Double Barrelled Detective Story (1902)
A Dog’s Tale (1904)
Extracts from Adam’s Diary (1904)
King Leopold’s Soliloquy (1905)
The War Prayer (1905)
The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories (1906)
What Is Man? (1906)
Eve’s Diary (1906)
Christian Science (1907)
A Horse’s Tale (1907)
Is Shakespeare Dead? (1907)
Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909)
Letters from the Earth (1909)
Queen Victoria’s Jubilee (1910)
My Platonic Sweetheart (1912)
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)
Mark Twain’s Autobiography (1924)
Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935)
Letters from the Earth (1962)
No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger (1969)
Concerning the Jews (1985)
Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War. (1992)
The Bible According to Mark Twain: Writings on Heaven, Eden, and the Flood (1995)
