Mark Twain Win Quotations

Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.

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.

Low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself.

Old habits cannot be thrown out the upstairs window. They have to be coaxed downstairs one step at a time.

It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.

As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it-it is like hitting a child.

Wine is a clog to the pen, not an inspiration.

There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage. One tells them from vinegar by the label.

...ignorant as the unborne babe! ignorant as unborn twins!

Evolution is a blind giant who rolls a snowball down a hill. The ball is made of flakes-circumstances. They contribute to the mass without knowing it. They adhere without intention, and without foreseeing what is to result. When they see the result they marvel at the monster ball and wonder how the contriving of it came to be originally thought out and planned. Whereas there was no such planning, there was only a law: the ball once started, all the circumstances that happened to lie in its path would help to build it, in spite of themselves.

When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is - heartbreaking bereavement.

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

No child should be permitted to grow up without exercise for imagination. It enriches life for him. It makes things wonderful and beautiful.

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.

The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.

Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!" Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

Human pride is not worthwhile; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it.

Good wine needs no bush; a jug is the thing.

Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection-that is the last and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement.

I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up...These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with.

Do not complain about growing old. It is a privilege denied to many.

One holds a bottle of red wine by the neck, a woman by the waist, and a bottle of champagne by the derriere.

Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery.

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.

what is joy without sorrow? what is success without failure? what is a win without a loss? what is health without illness? you have to experience each if you are to appreciate the other. there is always going to be suffering. it’s how you look at your suffering, how you deal with it, that will define you.

High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.

There are no standards of taste in wine... Each man's own taste is the standard, and a majority vote cannot decide for him or in any slightest degree affect the supremacy of his own standard.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

Too much of anything is bad, but too much good whiskey is barely enough.

You can tell German wine from vinegar by the label.

A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.

Ignorance is not, not knowing something. It is knowing what isn't so.

My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine everybody drinks water

Probably nor'east to sou'west winds varying to the southard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probably areas of rain, snow, heat and drought, succeeded or preceded by earth quakes

The person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it- namely, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through one's head.

France had neither winter nor summer nor morals - apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country

A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase.

As for the dinosaur - But Noah's conscience was easy; it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal and America had not then been discovered.

Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows

God rewards gamblers and fools. The crucial thing, when you win, is knowing which you were.

It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter.

Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.

My faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

A man can seldom -- very, very, seldom -- fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy.