Mark Twain | Writer & Lecturer ✍️

The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all.

Always tell the truth. That way you don't have to remember what you said.

I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it sh

When everyone is looking for gold, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

Marriage -- yes, it is the supreme felicity of life. I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when it comes.

Experience comes from bad judgment.

Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.

There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.

To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.

No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow.

When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.

It is easier to stay out than get out.

Men and women -- even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.

Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar.

July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so

Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages.

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made he (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only on

Man is without doubt the most interesting fool there is. He concedes that God made the angels immune from pain and death, and that he could have been similarly kind to man, but denies that he was under any moral obligation to do so.

When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.

I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.

for business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity.

Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.

The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.

How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.

Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.