Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Mark Twain (American Humorist)

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) was an American novelist and humorist. He took his nom de plume Mark Twain after the sounding calls of steamboatmen on the Mississippi River, on the banks of which he was brought up. The pseudonym is believed to have been a river navigation phrase meaning “two fathoms deep.”

Born in Florida, Missouri, Twain studied up to fifth grade and quit school when his father died. He supported his family first as a typesetter and later as a riverboat captain until the Civil War broke out in 1861. He then headed west, worked as a miner, and eventually became a journalist.

By 1866, Twain had gained national fame as a humorist and travel writer. He traveled to the Mediterranean and the Holy Land and subsequently published a comic account of his voyages and his American fellow-travelers, The Innocents Abroad (1869.)

Twain is much celebrated for three novels that are often used as academic texts, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876,) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885,) and Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894,) all of which give a vivid evocation of frontier life in the Mississippi valley. Twain’s writings are characterized by his natural wit, social criticism, and a keen understanding of human nature. He toured widely as a renowned public speaker and continued to write until his death of a heart attack.

Twain’s later books, such as The Mysterious Stranger (1916,) are often satirical and cynical, possibly in reaction to the conservative social milieu of his wife. He spent his last years dictating his autobiography—which had been the subject of many of his writing.

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Mark Twain

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Inspirational Quotes by Mark Twain (American Humorist)

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.
—Mark Twain
Topics: The Military

Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by.
—Mark Twain

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Correction, Reform, Hypocrisy, Habits, Habit, Just for Fun

Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Weather

The teacher reminded us that Romes liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor, later still with corn and oil for pretty much every man that had a vote to sellexactly our own history over again.
—Mark Twain

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Writing, Plagiarism

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity’s mind and were willing to reveal it.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Religion

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
—Mark Twain

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Knowledge, Experience

A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Lying, Lies, Deception/Lying

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.
—Mark Twain
Topics: God, Freedom, Prudence

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Lying, Lies, Deception/Lying

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Logic, Custom

When you cannot get a compliment in any other way pay yourself one.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Compliments, Praise

A sin takes on a new and real terror when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out
—Mark Twain
Topics: Sin

Can it be possible that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin?
—Mark Twain
Topics: Art

The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades
—Mark Twain

My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got.
—Mark Twain

Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Superstition

Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?
—Mark Twain
Topics: Happiness, Sanity

Get your facts first, and then you can distort ’em as you please.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Journalism, Facts

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Time

I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Money

I don’t know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Taxes, Taxation

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
—Mark Twain
Topics: The Truth, Thought, Memory, Truth, Reason

God: The most popular scapegoat for our sins.
—Mark Twain
Topics: God

I do not like work even when someone else does it.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Work

Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Prosperity, Success & Failure

No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.
—Mark Twain

I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive, finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house…The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it.
—Mark Twain
Topics: Cats

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