Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he...

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

While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.

Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!” Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer

I love to hear myself talk, because I get so much instruction and moral upheaval out of it.

He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a...

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare,...

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man’s.

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...

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

That’s the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don’t care, individuals do.

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

The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or...

When angry, count four. When very angry, swear.

What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!

lower animals” (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the...

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Satan had been making admiring remarks about certain of the Creator’s sparkling industries — remarks which, being read between the lines, were sarcasms.

To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and...

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

The lack of money is the root of all evil.

When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers.

I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my...

It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn’t try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled...

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights…sexual intercourse!…His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not...

A consciously exaggerated compliment is an offense.

It was such ecstacy to dream, and dream – till you got a bite.A scorpion bite. Then the first duty was to get up out of the grass and kill the scorpion; and the next...

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere.

The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.

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

Schoolboy days are no happier than the days of afterlife, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and...

There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress.

A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.

The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people.

That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.

In light matters–matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things–he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat.

Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!

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

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my...

Now he found out a new thing–namely, that 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.

If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.

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

An oyster has hardly any more reasoning power than a scientist has; and so it it is reasonably certain that this one jumped to the conclusion that the nineteen million years was a preparation for...

In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents?

Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”[Mark Twain, a Biography]

I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.