Top 500 Mark Twain Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “All emotion is involuntary when genuine.”

— Mark Twain

452. “My land, the power of training! Of influence! Of education! It can bring a body up to believe anything.”

— Mark Twain

453. “All generalizations are false, including this one.”

— Mark Twain

454. “Always obey your parents. When they are present. This is the best policy in the long run. Because if you don’t, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment.”

— Mark Twain

455. “It was a place of sin, loose women, whiskey and gambling. It was no place for a good Presbyterian, and I did not long remain one.”

— Mark Twain

456. “Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep ’til noon.”

— Mark Twain

457. “In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn’t know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it.”

— Mark Twain

458. “When one has tasted watermelons, one knows what angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took; we know it because she repented.”

— Mark Twain

459. “Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.”

— Mark Twain

460. “Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value.”

— Mark Twain

461. “But old fools is the biggest fools there is.”

— Mark Twain

462. “Not until you become a stranger to yourself will you be able to make acquaintance with the Friend.”

— Mark Twain

463. “Take your mind out every now and then and dance on it. It is getting all caked up.”

— Mark Twain

464. “We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.”

— Mark Twain

465. “The moral sense enables one to perceive morality, and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.”

— Mark Twain

466. “You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught.”

— Mark Twain

467. “A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can’t travel any way but sideways and backways.”

— Mark Twain

Featured in: Country Quotes

468. “Humor is tragedy plus time.”

— Mark Twain

469. “Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother’s path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard.”

— Mark Twain

470. “It’s not the good that die young, it’s the lucky.”

— Mark Twain

471. “It’s good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.”

— Mark Twain

472. “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.”

— Mark Twain

473. “Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.”

— Mark Twain

474. “Homely truth is unpalatable.”

— Mark Twain

475. “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad.”

— Mark Twain

476. “Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.”

— Mark Twain

477. “At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on there clothes to keep them from being stolen.”

— Mark Twain

478. “Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain’t so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.”

— Mark Twain

479. “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.”

— Mark Twain

480. “Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.”

— Mark Twain

481. “Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief.”

— Mark Twain

482. “The southerner talks music.”

— Mark Twain

483. “Geological time is not money.”

— Mark Twain

484. “My father was a Saint Bernard, my mother was a Collie, but I am a Presbyterian.”

— Mark Twain

485. “It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”

— Mark Twain

486. “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,’ but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”

— Mark Twain

Featured in: Book Quotes

487. “Wherefore being all of one mind, we do highly resolve that government of the grafted by the grafter for the grafter shall not perish from the earth.”

— Mark Twain

488. “Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we’d all have frozen to death!”

— Mark Twain

489. “Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.”

— Mark Twain

490. “Switzerland would me a mighty big place if it were ironed flat.”

— Mark Twain

491. “O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain;.”

— Mark Twain

492. “The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.”

— Mark Twain

493. “A sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience.”

— Mark Twain

494. “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 application of the word. Consider the flea! – incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage.”

— Mark Twain

495. “But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.”

— Mark Twain

496. “The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice – and always has been.”

— Mark Twain

497. “Tell the truth or trump-but get the trick.”

— Mark Twain

498. “We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.”

— Mark Twain

499. “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.”

— Mark Twain

500. “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of therest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

— Mark Twain