In his private heart, no man much respects himself. - Mark Twain# Heaven goes by favour. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. - Mark Twain# It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand. - Mark Twain# [about blacks] For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one effective weapon - laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution - these can laugh at a colossal humbug - push it a little - weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. - Mark Twain# The man who does not read good books is at no advantage over the man that can`t read them. - Mark Twain# There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford to and when he can. - Mark Twain# An ethical man is a Christian holding four aces. - Mark Twain# Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the opposition employs a million. - Mark Twain# We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove- lid again - and that is well; but she will also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore. - Mark Twain# Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. (Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.) - Mark Twain# I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't. - Mark Twain# When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant that I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years. (It never occurs to a boy that he will someday become as dumb as his father.) - Mark Twain# Principles have no real force except when one is well fed. - Mark Twain# Let us be thankful for the fools.But for them the rest of us couldn't succeed. - Mark Twain# By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity - another man's. - Mark Twain# I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places. - Mark Twain# Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. (The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are.) - Mark Twain# Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven. - Mark Twain# It is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them. - Mark Twain# Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah ... didn't miss the boat. - Mark Twain# Crank - a man with a new idea until it succeeds. - Mark Twain# I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have got so much more of it. - Mark Twain# One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it - they also believed the world was flat. - Mark Twain# In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. - Mark Twain# Never learn to do anything: if you don't learn, you'll always find someone else to do it for you. - Mark Twain# The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them. - Mark Twain# Let us endeavour to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. - Mark Twain# Life would be infinitely happier if could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. - Mark Twain# A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. - Mark Twain# George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie. - Mark Twain# Man - a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. - Mark Twain# Modesty died when clothes were born. - Mark Twain# Wagner's music is better than it sounds. - Mark Twain# Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson. - Mark Twain# In a museum in Havana there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, "one when he was a boy and one when he was a man." - Mark Twain# Methuselah lived to be 969 years old. You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime. - Mark Twain# When your friend begin to flatter you on how young you look, its a sure sign you're getting old. - Mark Twain# It is not best that we should all think alike; it is differences of opinion that make horse races. - Mark Twain# There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist. - Mark Twain# Adam was the only man who, when he said a good thing, knew that nobody had said it before him. - Mark Twain# Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. - Mark Twain# I have made a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. - Mark Twain# Golf is a good walk spoiled. (It's good sportsmanship not to pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.) - Mark Twain# The surest protection against temptation is cowardice. - Mark Twain# Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. - Mark Twain# Be virtuous and you will be eccentric. - Mark Twain# It is better to have old, second hand diamonds than none at all - Mark Twain# The secret source of humour itself is not joy, but sorrow. There is no humour in heaven. - Mark Twain# I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop. - Mark Twain# Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. - Mark Twain#