Book detail: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations is presented as a focused source page for quotations connected with this book, collection, transcript, or source record.
This book presents a curated selection of Mark Twain's most memorable and insightful quotes, showcasing his sharp wit and profound observations on various aspects of life and society.
The quotes below use the same card format as the rest of the site, including topics, source notes, copy actions, image creation, and sharing controls.
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“He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Names are not always what they seem.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Homely truth is unpalatable.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Honesty: The best of all the lost arts.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“a fully belly is little worth where the mind is starved.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate... and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Be good and you will be lonely.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We can't reach old age by another man's road.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blesses facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The Impartial Friend: Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all--the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Man proposes, but God blocks the game.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, "As unhappy as God."”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God--primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“God pours out love upon all with a lavish hand -- but He reserves vengeance for His very own.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“To be busy is man's only happiness.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Humor is the good natured side of a truth.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Men and women -- even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Marriage -- yes, it is the supreme felicity of life. I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when it comes.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“...majority Patriotism is the customary Patriotism.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter -- exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place -- the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The new political gospel: public office is private graft.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations