Mark Twain
real name Samuel L. Clemens; American author; b. 1835; d. 1910
Aphorisms Attributed to This Aphorist
1–20 (35)
tiny.ag/h5blv72l · submitted 1997
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
tiny.ag/r0a9zwmr · submitted 1997
In Paris they simply stared when I spoke to them in French; I never did succeed in making those idiots understand their language.
tiny.ag/zzcxms0q · submitted 1997
It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
tiny.ag/2guiksyw · submitted 1997
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech.
tiny.ag/okkjfcye · submitted 1997
Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
tiny.ag/q2py4esl · submitted 1997
Let us so live that when we come to die, even the undertaker will be sorry.
Mark Twain, in Life and Death and Vice and Virtue
tiny.ag/maz6ijau · submitted 1997
Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.
Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger, in Life and Death
tiny.ag/yh5kxuzq · submitted 1997
Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Mark Twain, (inscription beneath his bust in the Hall of Fame), in Law and Politics
tiny.ag/gymh6otw · submitted 1997
Man is the only animal that blushes -- or needs to.
tiny.ag/ne1vhxlr · submitted 1997
Never tell the truth to those unworthy of it.
tiny.ag/mwkuerjp · submitted 1997
Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
tiny.ag/mwoxawkr · submitted 1997
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
tiny.ag/7do2rifh · submitted 1997
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
Mark Twain, What is Man?, 1906, in Altruism and Cynicism
tiny.ag/edsop9bf · submitted 1997
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
tiny.ag/byjgwlzg · submitted 1997
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who cannot read them.
tiny.ag/fvxbdltz · submitted 1997
I'm opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.
tiny.ag/mbwozhf6 · submitted 1997
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
tiny.ag/qnvx9otp · submitted 1997
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
tiny.ag/r1bfukdv · submitted 1997
Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.
tiny.ag/jhbofhcv · submitted 1997
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
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