Mark Twain Quotes
20 quotes from Mark Twain — Author of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' and 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.' Known as the 'father of American literat….
“Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
“If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.”
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started.”
“I was born modest, but it didn't last.”
“A successful book is not made of what is in it, but of what is left out of it.”
“It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you.”
“Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
“Travel is fatal to prejudice.”
“Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.”
“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
“You have lived just the seventy years which are greatest in the world's history & richest in benefit & advancement to its peoples. These seventy years have done much more to widen the interval between man & the other animals than was accomplished by any five centuries which preceded them.”
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
“I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet.”
“I intend that this autobiography shall become a model for all future autobiographies when it is published after my death, and I also intend that it shall be read and admired a good many centuries because of its form and method — a form and method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face, resulting in contrasts which newly fire up the interest all along like contact of flint with steel.”
“I have had a great many birthdays in my time. I remember the first one very well, and I always think of it with indignation; everything was so crude, unaesthetic, primeval. Nothing like this at all. No proper appreciative preparation made; nothing really ready.”
“I do not think I would very cheerfully help a white student who would ask a benevolence of a stranger, but I do not feel so about the other color. We have ground the manhood out of them & the shame is ours, not theirs, & we should pay for it.”
“It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us — dreamers and indolent. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich — these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.”
“I have sampled this life, and it is sufficient.”
