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

Man was made at the end of the week's work, when God was tired.

"The noblest work of God?" Man. "Who found it out?" Man.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined ones.

If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principle difference between a dog and a man.

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

Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would hide my head in a bag.

I am only human, though I regret it.

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principle one was that they escaped teething.

As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men.

No civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.

Familiarity breed contempt- and children.

We lavish gifts upon them (children); but the most precious gift- our personal association, which means so much to them- we give grudgingly.

As long as you're in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot. And there ain't any real difference between triplets and an insurrection.

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws and thumps about things that the intellect scorns.

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.

Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists.

Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.

Do right and you will be conspicuous.

A man should not be without morals; it is better to have bad morals than none at all.

Be good and you will be lonesome.

Do your duty today and repent tomorrow.

To be good is to be noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.

Morals are an acquirement- like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis- no man is born with them.

Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.

Better a broken promise than none at all.

Virtue never has been as respectable as money.

Do good when you can, and charge when you think they will stand it.

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Nothing so needs reforming as other's habits.

A man may have no habits and have worse.

We ought never do wrong when people are looking.

Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.

There's a good spot tucked away somewhere in everybody. You'll be a long time finding it sometimes.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anyone.

Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.

Adam was the author of sin, and I wish he had taken out an international copyright on it.

A sin takes on new and real terrors when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out.

Martydoms cover a multitude of sins.

To lead a life of undiscovered sin! That is true joy.

The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.

(Adam) did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

Earn a character first if you can. And if you can't assume one.

Make it a point to 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.

... in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw throw those in authority off guard and give you an opportunity to commit more.

One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself.

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatever.

An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth.

There are several good protections against temptation but the surest is cowardice.

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

I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.

If a person offends you and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, so not resort to extreme measures. Simply watch your chances and hit him with a brick.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

It is not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.

The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Chastity- it can be carried too far.

Modesty died when clothes were born.

Each race determines for itself what indecencies are. Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came together, who would escape hanging?

Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

... no people in the world ever did achieve freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that wil succeed must begin in blood.

We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented- which was human liberty.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views; when he haas worn them out the conservative adopts them.

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

(man) is the only animal that has the True Religion- several of them.

If a man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him.

There has been only one true Christian. They caught and crucified him- early.

There are two kinds of Christian morals, one private and the other public. There are so distinct, so unrelated, that they are no more akin to each other than are archangels and politicians.

The Church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little by way of example.

Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians; then the pagan world will go to school to the Christian- not to acquire his religion, but his guns.

The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of Anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

The first thing a missionary teaches a savage is indecency.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.

One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world was flat.

Heaven for climate, Hell for company.

If I cannot swear in heaven I shall not stay there,

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

Pessimist: the optimist who didn't arrive.

What is human life? The first third a good time, the rest remembering about it.

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.

When in doubt tell the truth.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

Often the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.

Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think.

Honesty is the best policy- when there is money in it.

Carlyle said "s lie cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them.

An honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.

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

A truth is hard to kill... a lie told well is immortal.

A classic- something that everybody wants have to read and nobody wants to read.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; person attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

They (the Concord, Mass. Library) have expelled Huck from their library as "trash and suitable only for the slums." That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.

My works are like water. The works of the greta masters are like wine. But everyone drinks water.

It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others- and less trouble.

It is better to support schools than jails.

Training is everything... cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not.


My axiom is, to succeed in business: avoid my example.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

The average man is profoundly ignorant of countries that lie remote from his own.

Nothing helps scenery like bacon and eggs.

Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others- his breath.

The English are mentioned in the Bible; Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

Against the assualt of laughter nothing can stand.

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.

Few of us can stand prosperity- another man's I mean.

He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages.

Put all your eggs in one basket and- WATCH THAT BASKET.