Top 500 Mark Twain Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I wonder if God created man because He was disappointed with the monkey.”

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

303. “If God had meant for us to be naked, we’d have been born that way.”

— Mark Twain

304. “The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.”

— Mark Twain

305. “Do your duty today and repent tomorrow.”

— Mark Twain

306. “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.”

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

315. “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

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

318. “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

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

— Mark Twain

320. “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

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

323. “Distance lends enchantment to the view.”

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

328. “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

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Mark Twain

336. “Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.”

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

338. “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

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

343. “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

344. “When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself.”

— Mark Twain

345. “I never write “metropolis” for seven cents when I can write “city” and get paid the same.”

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

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

— Mark Twain

348. “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

349. “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

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

— Mark Twain