Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Quotes

• I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell-you see, I have friends in both places.

• I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have got so much more of it.

• Anyone who stops learning is old, whether twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing you can do is keep your mind young.

• Never learn to do anything: if you don't learn, you'll always find someone else to do it for you.

• Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

• Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

• Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

• The report of my death was an exaggeration.

• Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

• A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

• All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

• Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.

• Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.

• I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

• If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.

• In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.

• My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.

• Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

• Often it does seem a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.

• Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.