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Mark Twain Quotes - Page 69

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The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is

The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities.

Mark Twain
Baby, Ideas, House
Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.2171, GENERAL PRESS

It's not as bad as it sounds.

Mark Twain
Sound

The true and lasting genius of humour does not drag you thus to boxes labelled 'pathos,' 'humour,' and show you all the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform. How I used to laugh at Simon Tapperwit, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can't do it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour. It must be antiseptic.

Mark Twain
Humor, Laughing, Doe

Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity-- Early to bed and early to rise Make a man healthy and wealth and wise. As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.

Mark Twain
Wise, Boys, Men

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 single feature in it that he actually values.

Mark Twain
Sex, Men, Giving

What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those of other things, are his history. These are his life, and they are not written. Everyday would make a whole book of 80,000 words -- 365 books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man -- the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Mark Twain
Real, Book, Men
Autobiography vol. 1 (1924)

So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.

Mark Twain
Humor, Thinking, Years
Mark Twain, Gary Scharnhorst (2009). “Mainly the truth: interviews with Mark Twain”, University Alabama Press

Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.

Mark Twain
Country, Travel, Heaven
Mark Twain, Michael Barry Frank, Robert Pack Browning, Lin Salamo, Frederick Anderson, Mark Twain (1980). “Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume III: (1883-1891)”, p.574, Univ of California Press

Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!

Mark Twain
Hands, Luck, Honest
Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, p.422, Univ of California Press

If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.

Mark Twain
Art, Stars, Power
Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.215, Courier Corporation

Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Mark Twain
Laughter, Blow, Rags
"The Mysterious Stranger". Book by Mark Twain, 1916.

There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction.

Mark Twain
People, Earth, Destruction
Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.4169, GENERAL PRESS

Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave.

Mark Twain
Courage, Brave Person, Bravery
Mark Twain (2014). “Mark Twain on Common Sense: Timeless Advice and Words of Wisdom from America's Most-Revered Humorist”, p.37, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

The human being places sexual intercourse above all other joys, but leaves it out of his heaven.

Mark Twain
Joy, Heaven, Intercourse

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
Summer, Winter, France

The devil's aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despots dread of a newspaper that laughs.

Mark Twain
Light, Water, Laughing
Mark Twain, Bob Blaisdell (2013). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”, p.97, Courier Corporation

A better idea than my own is to listen.

Mark Twain
Ideas, My Own

How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!

Mark Twain
Sleep, Men, Age
Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.39, Courier Corporation

The moral sense enables one to perceive morality, and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it.

Mark Twain
Ethics, Morality, Enjoy
Mark Twain (2017). “MARK TWAIN: 12 Novels, 195 Short Stories, Autobiography, 10 Travel Books, 160+ Essays & Speeches (Illustrated): Including Letters & Biographies – The Complete Works of Mark Twain: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn, The Innocents Abroad, Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Life on the Mississippi…”, p.8344, e-artnow

Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.

Mark Twain
Believe, Literature, Bees

Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.

Mark Twain
Ignorant, Roger, Wells
Mark Twain (1992). “Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn”, p.175, Wordsworth Editions

I have been cautioned to talk but be careful not to say anything. I do not consider this a difficult task.

Mark Twain
Say Anything, Tasks, Be Careful
Mark Twain (2004). “The Portable Mark Twain”, p.537, Penguin

There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.

Mark Twain
Party, Civilization, Differences
Mark Twain (1869). “The Innocents Abroad: or, The New Pilgrims' Progress”, p.275

I played Chess with him and would have beaten him sometimes only he always took back his last move, and ran the game out differently

Mark Twain
Moving, Games, Chess
Mark Twain (2012). “Autobiographical Writings”, p.311, Penguin

We Americans are the most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.

Mark Twain
Luxury, People, Flags

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