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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“That optimist of yours is always ready to turn hell's backyard into a play-ground.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We never knew an ignorant person yet but was prejudiced.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“...one should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist. ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A wanton waste of projectiles.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“He could charm an audience an hour on a stretch without ever getting rid of an idea.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is noble to teach oneself; it is still nobler to teach others.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“In literature imitations do not imitate.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Well - Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“...heaven for climate, and hell for society.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It has always been a peculiarity of the human race that it keeps two sets of morals in stock-the private and the real, and the public and the artificial.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A dream...I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“...the circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I would not rob you of your food or your clothes or your umbrella, but if I caught your German out I would take it. But I don't study any more,- I have given it up.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Carlyle said 'a lie cannot live.' It shows that he did not know how to tell them.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“There is nothing like instances to grow hair on a bald-headed argument.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Patriotism is merely a religion-love of country, worship of country, devotion to the country's flag and honor and welfare.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“If all men were rich, all men would be poor.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“When all is said and done, the one sole condition that makes spiritual happiness and preserves it is the absence of doubt.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is your human environment that makes climate”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations