Quotes from Mark Twain

We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hairbreadth escape and bloodcurdling adventure which will never be recorded in any history.

He lay down upon a sumptuous divan, and proceeded to instruct himself with honest zeal.

T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it.

On the island at our right was the machine they call the Nilometer, a stone-column whose business it is to mark the rise of the river and prophecy whether it will reach only thirty-two feet and produce a famine, or whether it will properly flood the land at forty and produce plenty, or whether it will rise to forty-three and bring death and destruction to flocks and crops—but how it does all this they could not explain to us so that we could understand.

All men will confess that without Christian civilization war must have remained a poor and trifling thing to the end of time.

He is in heaven now, and happy; or if not there, he bides in hell and is content; for in that place he will find neither abbot nor yet bishop.

Life is planned with one principle objective to make you do all the particular things you particularly don't want to do.

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass. Notebook When

I do not wish to hear about the moon from someone who has not been there.

O, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavor, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don't you rob your church?

They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in.

The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation.