Mark Twain Quotes #2

Total abstinence is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an extent. In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to totally abstain from total abstinence itself.

I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.

None but an ass pays a compliment and asks a favor at the same time. There are many asses.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

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

Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.

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

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Don’t tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don’t tell them where they know the fish.

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

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.

Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

All generalizations are false, including this one.

Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.

It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.

Necessity is the mother of taking chances.

Chastity — you can carry it too far.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity — another man’s I mean.

Laws control the lesser man… Right conduct controls the greater one.

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

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.

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

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she laid an asteroid.

The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

There is nothing that saps one’s confidence as the knowing how to do a thing.

We have the best government that money can buy.

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

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

I don’t give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.

In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours.

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