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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“Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is not worth while to strain one's self to tell the truth to people who habitually discount everything you tell them, whether it is true or isn't.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Never learn to do anything: if you don't learn, you'll always find someone else to do it for you.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“In America, we hurry-which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us...we burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe...What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“When a teacher calls a boy by his entire name, it means trouble.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“If I had been helping the Almighty when he created man, I would have had him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How much better to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning!”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambition.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Modesty died when clothes were born.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Custom is petrification, nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“To say a compliment well is a high art and few possess it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us-oh infinitely better for us-if the serpent had been forbidden”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Is a person's public and private opinion the same? It is thought there have been instances.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“There are no grades of vanity; there are only grades of ability in concealing it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“If you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward. You will never get her full confidence again.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Every man is wholly honest to himself and to God, but not to any one else.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“....honest men are few when it comes to themselves.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The partitions of the houses were so thin we could hear the women occupants of adjoining rooms changing their minds.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest works of God where is the ignoblest?”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is often the case that a man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Whatever you say, say it with conviction”
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.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations