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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“There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Hunger is the handmaid of genius”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Never tell a lie-except for practice.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“But we are all insane, anyway. Note the mountain-climbers.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“You are a coward when you even seem to have backed down from a thing you openly set out to do”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Comedy keeps the heart sweet.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“When some men discharge an obligation, you can hear the report for miles around.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Architects cannot teach nature anything.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of growths”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“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.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they can't sleep anyhow.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Etiquette requires us to admire the human race.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself, there would be no heroes”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death!”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the Constitution, it would be better all around.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“...the administration of the law can never go lax where every individual sees to it that it grows not lax in his own case, or in cases which fall under his eyes.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Let us swear while we may, for in heaven it will not be allowed”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and over these ideals they dispute-but they all worship money.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The radical of one century is the conservative of the next.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it-when unpopular.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“To forget pain is to be painless; to forget care is to be rid of it; to go abroad is to accomplish both.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations
“To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye-what ye say of me is now of no consequence.”
Source: Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations