Top 100 Inspiring Mark Twain Quotes

In this post, you will find Top 100 Inspiring Mark Twain Quotes.

 

Mark Twain Quotes

 

“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”

 

“The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”

 

“Don’t wait. The time will never be just right.”

 

“Golf is a good walk spoiled.”

 

“A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.”

 

“The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

 

“It is wiser to find out than suppose.”

 

“A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”

 

“The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.”

 

“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”

 

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.”

 

“Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.”

 

“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.”

 

“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.”

 

“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

 

“Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain.”

 

“Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful of your life.”

 

“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

 

“Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.”

 

“When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.”

 

“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

 

“You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.”

 

“Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.”

 

“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.”

 

“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”

 

“When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.”

 

“I can live for two months on a good compliment.”

 

“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”

 

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.”

 

“Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.”

 

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

 

“Thunder is good, thunder is impressive, but it is lightning that does the work.”

 

“The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.”

 

“Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.”

 

“A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

 

“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”

 

“Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.”

 

“Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”

 

“Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.”

 

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

 

“Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.”

 

“I make it a rule never to smoke while I’m sleeping.”

 

“The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.”

 

“The more you explain it, the more I don’t understand it.”

 

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”

 

“Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.”

 

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”

 

“Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed.”

 

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”

 

“There’s one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he’s crooked.”

 

“Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you would rather have talked.”

 

“I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.”

 

“To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.”

 

“Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”

 

“I don’t like to commit myself about heaven and hell – you see, I have friends in both places.”

 

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

 

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.”

 

“The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.”

 

“When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.”

 

“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”

 

“The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.”

 

“I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any.”

 

“Let us endeavor so to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

 

“Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.”

 

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”

 

“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”

 

“It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.”

 

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

 

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”

 

“Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I’ve done it thousands of times.”

 

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”

 

“With courage, you will dare to take risks, have the strength to be compassionate, and the wisdom to be humble. Courage is the foundation of integrity.”

 

“Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”

 

“A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.”

 

“It is the epitome of life. The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.”

 

“Life is short, break the rules. Forgive quickly, kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably and never regret anything that makes you smile.”

 

“Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.”

 

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

 

“Do something every day that you don’t want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.”

 

“The finest clothing made is a person’s own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.”

 

“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can’t find anybody who can tell me what they want.”

 

“A home without a cat–and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat–may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?”

 

“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”

 

“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.”

 

“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.”

 

“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.”

 

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

 

“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.”

 

“All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer and to conceal valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten”

 

“By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a “noble” animal? The more brutal and crueler and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward–you will never get her full confidence again.”

 

“Of all God’s creatures, there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.”

 

“I am 34 and she is 24; I am young and very handsome (I make this statement with the fullest confidence, for I got it from her,) and she is much the most beautiful girl I ever saw (I said that before she was anything to me, and so it is worthy of all belief) and she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and the gentlest, and the daintiest, and the most modest and unpretentious, and the wisest in all things she should be wise in and the most ignorant in all matters it would not grace her to know, and she is sensible and quick, and loving and faithful, forgiving, full of charity…. She is the most perfect gem of womankind that ever I saw in my life — and I will stand by that remark until I die.”

 

“Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one’s head.”

 

“I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases — the dances are precisely the same. You have only to spin around with frightful velocity and steer clear of the furniture. This has a charming and bewildering effect. You catch glimpses of a confused and whirling multitude of people, and above them a row of distracted fiddlers extending entirely around the room. The waltz and the polka are very exhilarating — to use a mild term — amazingly exhilarating.”

 

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear–not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea! –incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who “didn’t know what fear was,” we ought always to add the flea–and put him at the head of the procession.”

 

“It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory–and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making.”

 

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