Mark Twain quotes - page 46

Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. (Mark Twain)
None but the dead have free speech. None but the dead are permitted to speak truth.
Mark Twain
After a few months' acquaintance with European coffee, one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with its clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all . . .
Mark Twain
History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably.
Mark Twain
Suppose ... burglars had made entry into this ... library. Picture them seated here on this floor, pouring the light of their dark-lanterns over some books they found, and thus absorbing moral truths and getting moral uplift. The whole course of their lives would have been changed. As it was, they kept straight on in their immoral way and were sent to jail. For all I know, they may next be sent to Congress.
Mark Twain
There are no grades of vanity, there are only grades of ability in concealing it.
Mark Twain
It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.
Mark Twain
Independence - is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.
Mark Twain
The rain is famous for falling on the just and unjust alike, but if I had the management of such affairs I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust out doors I would drown him.
Mark Twain
It is often the case that the man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one.
Mark Twain
A good and wholesome thing is a little harmless fun in this world it tones a body up and keeps him human and prevents him from souring. (Mark Twain)
He is useless on top of the ground he ought to be be under it, inspiring the cabbages.
Mark Twain
To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself... Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.
Mark Twain
The church is always trying to get other people to reform it might not be a bad idea to reform itself.
Mark Twain
All good things arrive unto them that wait - and don't die in the meantime.
Mark Twain
It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.
Mark Twain
There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares.
Mark Twain
A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.
Mark Twain
War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
Mark Twain
There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.
Mark Twain
Never waste a lie you never know when you may need it. (Mark Twain)
Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.
Mark Twain
In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.
Mark Twain
I never did a thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise that I didn't repent of within twenty-four hours.
Mark Twain
A man can seldom -- very, very, seldom -- fight a winning fight against his training the odds are too heavy.
Mark Twain