Top 500 Mark Twain Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.”

— Mark Twain

302. “If you don’t know how to pronounce a word, say it loudly. Do not compound mispronunciation with inaudibility.”

— Mark Twain

303. “A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.”

— Mark Twain

304. “Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.”

— Mark Twain

305. “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.”

— Mark Twain

306. “Unused talents gives you no advantage over someone who has no talent at all.”

— Mark Twain

307. “Never be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty.”

— Mark Twain

308. “I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable.”

— Mark Twain

309. “The physician who knows only medicine, knows not even medicine.”

— Mark Twain

310. “Don’t wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality.”

— Mark Twain

311. “We have the best government that money can buy.”

— Mark Twain

312. “Shut the door not that it lets in the cold but that it lets out the coziness.”

— Mark Twain

313. “The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.”

— Mark Twain

314. “Be good and you will be lonesome.”

— Mark Twain

315. “Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.”

— Mark Twain

316. “Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.”

— Mark Twain

317. “But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.”

— Mark Twain

318. “On with the dance, let the joy be unconfined.”

— Mark Twain

319. “The ancients stole all our ideas from us.”

— Mark Twain

320. “He liked to like people, therefore people liked him.”

— Mark Twain

321. “Distance lends enchantment to the view.”

— Mark Twain

322. “The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny.”

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

324. “Don’t go to sleep, so many people die there.”

— Mark Twain

325. “The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor.”

— Mark Twain

326. “And what is a man without energy? Nothing – nothing at all.”

— Mark Twain

327. “A friend is someone who stays in when the rest of the world has gone out.”

— Mark Twain

328. “Better a broken promise than none at all.”

— Mark Twain

329. “Consider the average intelligence of the common man, then realize 50% are even stupider.”

— Mark Twain

330. “France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.”

— Mark Twain

331. “Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born – a hundred million years – and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together.”

— Mark Twain

332. “It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.”

— Mark Twain

333. “Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once.”

— Mark Twain

334. “Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it.”

— Mark Twain

335. “The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.”

— Mark Twain

336. “The Book of Mormon is chloroform in print.”

— Mark Twain

337. “Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.”

— Mark Twain

338. “Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.”

— Mark Twain

339. “Obscurity and a competence – that is the life that is best worth living.”

— Mark Twain

340. “Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.”

— Mark Twain

341. “You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?”

— Mark Twain

342. “The most successful people are those who do all year long what they would otherwise do on their summer vacation.”

— Mark Twain

343. “A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.”

— Mark Twain

344. “Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.”

— Mark Twain

345. “The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.”

— Mark Twain

346. “Never put off until tomorrow what you can avoid altogether. A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure.”

— Mark Twain

347. “Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth.”

— Mark Twain

348. “The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.”

— Mark Twain

349. “A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.”

— Mark Twain

350. “Children and fools always speak the truth.”

— Mark Twain