Mark Twain

A lawyer one day spoke to him [Mark Twain] with his hands in his pockets. “Is it not a curious sight to see a lawyer with his hands in his own pockets?” remarked the humorist in his quiet drawl.

[ To his wife Olivia, who had repeated his swearing :] You got the words right, Livy, but you don’t know the tune.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

[ On the Bible :] It is full of interest. It hasnoble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has leftentirely out of it the supremest of all hisdelights, the one ecstasy that stands first andforemost in the heart of every individual ofhis race—and of ours—sexual intercourse!It is as if a lost and perishing person in aroasting desert should be told by a rescuer hemight choose and have all longed for thingsbut one, and he should elect to leave outwater!

News is history in its first and best form, its vivid and fascinating form . . . history is the pale and tranquil reflection of it.

You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I’ll tell you what his ’pinions is.

There is no God, no universe, no humanrace, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought —a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlornamong the empty eternities!

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

The language [German] which enables aman to travel all day in one sentence withoutchanging cars.

I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I canstand any society. All that I care to know isthat a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.

I would throw out the old maxim, “Mycountry, right or wrong,” and instead I would say, “My country when she is right.”

What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense.

Let me make the superstitions of a nationand I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

“Classic.” A book which people praise and don’t read.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots,” with proud swelling hearts defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did —and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn.

[ Quoting an “American joke” :] In Boston theyask, How much does he know? in New York, How much is he worth? in Philadelphia, Whowere his parents?

He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn’tstraight.

He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly.

Even the clearest and most perfectcircumstantial evidence is likely to be at fault, after all, and therefore ought to be received with great caution. Take the case of any pencil, sharpened by any woman: if you have witnesses, you will find she did it with a knife; but if you take simply the aspect of the pencil, you will say she did it with her teeth.

Thanksgiving Day . Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.

Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by you only regret that you didn’t see him do it.

When I reflect upon the number ofdisagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!—incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick.

Bill Styles . . . spoke of the low grade of legislative morals. “Kind of discouraging. You see, it’s so hard to find men of a so high type of morals that they’ll stay bought .”

Dying man couldn’t make up his mind which place to go to—both have their advantages, “heaven for climate, hell for company!”

Don’t you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardnessand stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to.

The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from themass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only—not from its privileged classes.

Here I was, in a country where a right tosay how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. . . . I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal.

A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.