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1
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Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
(Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author. Following the Equator, ch. 23 (1897).)
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2
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The foreigner coming to these shores is more impressed at first by our sky-scrapers. They are new to him. He has not done anything of the sort since he built the tower of Babel. The foreigner is shocked by them. In the daylight they are ugly. They are—well, too chimneyfied and too snaggy—like a mouth that needs attention from a dentist; like a cemetery that is all monuments and no gravestones. But at night, seen from the river where they are columns towering against the sky, all sparkling with light, they are fairylike; they are beauty more satisfactory to the soul than anything man has dreamed of since the Arabian nights
(Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author. speech, December 6, 1900, to the St. Nicholas Society, New York. Mark Twain's Speeches, ed. William Dean Howells, Harpers (1910).)
Read more quotations about / on: sky, river, beauty, light, night
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3
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[Man] has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race—and ours—sexual intercourse! It is as if a lost and perishing person in a roasting desert should be told by a rescuer he might choose and have all longed for things but one, and he should elect to leave out water!
(Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author. Satan, in Letters from the Earth, p. 8 (1962).)
Read more quotations about / on: leave, water, lost, heaven, heart
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4
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Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
(Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author. Following the Equator, ch. 7, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," (1897).)
Read more quotations about / on: truth
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5
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The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause.
(Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author. Mark Twain's Speeches, introduction, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (1923).)
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6
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Protestant parents still keep a Bible handy in the house, so that the children can study it, and one of the first things the little boys and girls learn is to be righteous and holy and not piss against the wall. They study those passages more than they study any others, except those which incite to masturbation. Those they hunt out and study in private.
(Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author. Satan, in Letters from the Earth, p. 50, ed. Bernard DeVoto, Harpers (1942).)
Read more quotations about / on: house, children
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7
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By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
(Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910), U.S. author. Following the Equator, ch. 39, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar," (1897).)
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