The Notable, Quotable Mark Twain

Known primarily for his many classic novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain was also a great humorist and lecturer, and his folksy wisdom has maintained its popularity since his death. Unafraid to voice his opinions, his famous aphorisms hold profound thoughts wrapped in just the right bit of humor. Let's take a look at a few of the most interesting:

On Human Nature
Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world - and never will.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

The human race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon - laughter.

Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.

To create man was a fine and original idea; but to add the sheep was a tautology.

It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.

The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, & over these ideals they dispute & cannot unite - but they all worship money.

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

On Religion
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

You never see any of us Presbyterians getting in a sweat about religion and trying to massacre the neighbors. Let us all be content with the tried and safe old regular religions, and take no chances on wildcat.

But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination.

On Politics & Society
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

To put it in rude, plain, unpalatable words - true patriotism, real patriotism: loyalty not to a Family and a Fiction, but a loyalty to the Nation itself!..."Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it." [Czar Nicholas II]

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.

Citizenship? We have none! In place of it we teach patriotism which Samuel Johnson said a hundred and forty or a hundred and fifty years ago was the last refuge of the scoundrel -- and I believe that he was right. I remember when I was a boy and I heard repeated time and time again the phrase, 'My country, right or wrong, my country!' How absolutely absurd is such an idea. How absolutely absurd to teach this idea to the youth of the country.

On Literature
The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter - it's the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.

A classic - something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

On Travel
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

It liberates the vandal to travel - you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction.

Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.