MARK TWAIN, ie Samuel Clemens: QUOTES

Always do right - this will gratify some and astonish the rest.

An enemy can partly ruin a man, but int takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect.

Are you so inobservant that you do not yet realize that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.


Buy land. They've stopped making it.

By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are more pliable.

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

Fleas can be taught nearly anything a congressman can.

Giving up smoking is easy. I've done it hundreds of times.

I am an old man and I have many troubles, but most of them never happened.

I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.

I am opposed to millionaires but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.

I did not attend his funeral, but I wrote a nice letter saying I approved of it.

I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.

I was born modest. Not all over, but in spots.

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be - a Christian.

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

In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its one sure defense.

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



















Here are a handful of articles, stories, etc about or by Clemens/Twain:

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/02/04/markTwain.html ...Columbia University's newspaper, Columbia News, does a story on Twain 92 years after his death


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain ...The Wikipedia article

http://www.cmgww.com/historic/twain/about/writings.htm ....site dubbing itself the "official" Mark Twain site. Don't be discouraged when you see nothing on the home page - the drop boxes will take you to various sections such as a biography, listings of his writings, quotes, etc. I never looked at the entire site so I'm not even sure what all is there. Haven't checked to see if it is complete, but there is a listing of Twain's work

http://www.marktwainhouse.org/ ...site for the Mark Twain House and Museum, even has kids' activities

http://www.twainquotes.com/ ...has not only quotes but also other writings, such as "Mark Twain and the Countess Massiglia , 'The lowest-down woman on the planet' " , the Lost Autobiography of Orion Clemens, "Mark Twain's Quarrel with Undertakers: It All Begins With Jennie" and more