Quotes from Mark Twain

Mark Twain, cynical about so much else, has a particular reverence in the Holy Land for sitting where a god has stood. What flabbergasted him was that his traveling companions would be in such a sanctified environment and winter what they saw according to other writers or their denominational background instead their own experience with the holy.

Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him.

Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles.

A full belly is of little worth where the mind is starved, and the heart.

Don't let school interfere with your education.

It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue (German) ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.

The first time the Deity came down to earth, he brought life and death; when he came the second time, he brought hell.

The first most important day of you life is the day you were born. The second is when you discover why.

It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror.

A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes.

As regards his health--and the rest of the things--the average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.

All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures — an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.