Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Quotes

• I find that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.

• In this world one must be like everybody else if he doesn't want to provoke scorn or envy or jealousy.

• If there is a God, He is a malign thug.

• To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add sheep was a tautology.

• So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: "Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is." Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.

• The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life--hence it is a valuable possession to him.

• I was gradually coming to have a mysterious and shuddery reverence for this girl; nowadays whenever she pulled out from the station and got her train fairly started on one of those horizonless transcontinental sentences of hers, it was borne in upon me that I was standing in the awful presence of the Mother of the German Language... She had exactly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

• New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

• Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

• We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that a savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.

• I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

• The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.

• Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man has a voice, brutal laws are impossible.

• I asked tom if countries always apologize when they had done wrong, and he says, 'Yes, the little one does.'

• Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have someone to divide it with.

• Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

• Habit is habit, and not to be flung out the window by man, but coaxed downstairs, a step at a time.

• Life does not consist mainly - or even largely - of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that are forever blowing through one's mind.

• I have spent most of my life worrying about things that have never happened

• In his private heart no man respects himself.