Mark Twain Men Quotations

The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's.

We need not worry so much about what man descends from; it's what he descends to that shames the human race.

It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.

Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.

The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.

Laws control the lesser man... Right conduct controls the greater one.

Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to.

Make your mark in New York and you are a made man.

What would men be without women? Scarce, sir, mighty scarce.

No man has a wholly undiseased mind; in one way or another all men are mad

I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born

I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.

There are no wild animals until man makes them so.

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.

No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me. I am the only judge... There are no standards--no real standards. Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him.

Armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it.

Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.

It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.

Adam was the luckiest man in the world. He had no mother-in-law.

There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angelship.

The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery!

...we all know that in all matters of mere opinion that [every] man is insane-just as insane as we are...we know exactly where to put our finger upon his insanity: it is where his opinion differs from ours....All Democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it. None but the Republicans. All the Republicans are insane, but only the Democrats can perceive it. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself.

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

A man may have no bad habits and have worse

The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval - a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death.

If men bore children, there would only be one born in each family.

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

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, political, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.

Behind every successful man, there is a woman - And behind every unsuccessful man, there are two.

I begin to see that a man's got to be in his own heaven to be happy.

If all men were rich, all men would be poor.

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom when he can no longer be led by the nose.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

He was such a good man that people hated to see him coming.

Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.

True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.

War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.

I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way, by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else....I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.

I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't know why.

....try the mustard, - a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard.

I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument an an unsuspected yearning to play on it, which are bound to wake up an demand attention someday. Therefore you who rail at such that disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a guitar, beware! For sooner or later your own time will come.

A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.

By reading keep in a state of excited igorance, like a blind man in a house afire; flounder around, immensely but unintelligently interested; don't know how I got in and can't find the way out, but I'm having a booming time all to myself.Don't know what a Schelgesetzentwurf is, but I keep as excited over it and as worried about it as if it were my own child. I simply live on the Sch.; it is my daily bread. I wouldn't have the question settled for anything in the world.

It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.

...mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.

Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.

Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.

It is the Creator´s Grand Army, and he is the Commander-in-Chief... With these facts before you, now try to guess man´s chiefest pet name for this ferocious Commander-in-Chief? I will save you the trouble but you must not laugh. It is Our Father in Heaven.

I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way.

A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart.

I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience.

No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

If I were required to guess off-hand, and without collusion with higher minds, what is the bottom cause of the amazing material and intellectual advancement of the last fifty years, I should guess that it was the modern-born and previously non-existent disposition on the part of men to believe that a new idea can have value.

Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch.

Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man has a voice, brutal laws are impossible

Jesus died to save men - a small thing for an immortal to do - and didn't save many, anyway. But if he had been damned for the race, that would have been act of a size proper to a god, and would have saved the whole race.

Strange a God who mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness, then invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none Himself; who frowns upon crimes yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon Himself; and finally with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship Him!

I have been scientifically studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so-called,) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result profoundly humiliating to me. For it obliges me to renounce my allegiance to the Darwinian theory of the Ascent of Man from the Lower Animals; since it now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one, this new and truer one to be named the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies; the domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals, its princes of Monaco and its stonemasons of Cromarty meeting, barren of man-made gauds and meretricious decorations, upon the one majestic level!

God's noblest work. Man who found it out? Man.

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

Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life.

....honest men are few when it comes to themselves.

The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty

No man is straitly honest to any but himself and God.

Every man is wholly honest to himself and to God, but not to any one else.

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

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. As in the words of Wayne Dyer, when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. Sometimes to know with certainty that a particular thing is "true", will actually be the very thing that keeps you from attaining the things you seek to achieve.

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. You cannot eliminate habits that no longer serve you. You can only replace them with new habits that support your goals. Moment by moment, you need to live with awareness and structure the habits that you include or exclude in your days.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. There is nothing more satisfying than that sense of being completely "at home" in your own skin. When you achieve that as a natural state of "being", then you can finally look beyond yourself and fully contribute all your talents to the world.

The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful.

We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks- if we agree with him.

Few of us stand prosperity; another man's I mean.

Dying man couldn't make up his mind which place to go to-both have their advantages, heaven for the climate, hell for the company!

Men are more compassionate/(nobler)/magnanimous/generous than God; for men forgive their dead, but God does not.

Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion

They do say that when a man starts down hill everybody is ready to help him with a kick, and I suppose it is so.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, Corn-Pone stands for Self-Approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is Conformity.

I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.

The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities

Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it.

At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass

Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived.

Man has been here 32,000 years. That it took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is, I dunno. If The Eiffel Tower were now to represent the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle knob at its summit would represent man's share of that age; and anybody would perceive that the skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.

To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.

It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth.