quotes by Mark Twain

"Wheresoever she was, there was Eden."
— Mark Twain (The Diaries of Adam and Eve (Hesperus Press))

"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt."
— 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 also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."
— Mark Twain

"Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt. "
— Mark Twain

"The nicest winter I ever spent was a summer in Seattle."
— Mark Twain

"Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion."
— Mark Twain

"To me [Edgar Allen Poe's:] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic:]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death."
— Mark Twain

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."
— Mark Twain

"Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities."
— Mark Twain

"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot."
— Mark Twain (The Adventures of Huck Finn)

"A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place."
— Mark Twain

"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up."
— Mark Twain

"I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them."
— Mark Twain

"What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. . . . The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. . . . When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world."
— Mark Twain

" You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

"
— Mark Twain

"I would have written you a shorter letter if I had more time"
— Mark Twain

"What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written."
— Mark Twain

"There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt. "
— Mark Twain (Pudd'nhead Wilson)

"In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing."
— Mark Twain

"It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you."
— Mark Twain