Mark Twain Cat Quotations

If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.

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

If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way.

Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

I saw a cat yesterday with 4 legs and yet it was only a yellow cat, and rather small, too, for its size. They were not all fore legs several of them were hind legs; indeed almost a majority of them were.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it / and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again / and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn by no other way

A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them.

Going to law is losing a cow for the sake of a cat.

He had an uncommon fondness for cats. As an old man summering in New Hampshire, Twain even rented kittens from a nearby farm to keep him company until he returned home. "If man could be crossed with the cat," said Twain, "it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat." There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends.

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.

If you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward. You will never get her full confidence again.

When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there- in sunny weather- stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose.

The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid.

The proverb says, "Born lucky, always lucky," and I am very superstitious. As a small boy I was notoriously lucky. It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a 2/3 drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise.

While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.

Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use.

Man is the Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. Indeed, my experiments have proven to me that he is the Unreasoning Animal... In truth, man is incurably foolish. Simple things which other animals easily learn, he is incapable of learning. Among my experiments was this. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately.

We had a sunset of a very fine sort. The vast plain of the sea was marked off in bands of sharply-contrasted colors: great stretches of dark blue, others of purple, others of polished bronze; the billowy mountains showed all sorts of dainty browns and greens, blues and purples and blacks, and the rounded velvety backs of certain of them made one want to stroke them, as one would the sleek back of a cat.

When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction.

A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

A home without a cat — and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat — may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does -- but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use.

Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something)

I simply can´t resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course.

Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one.

an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

A man who carries a cat by the tail is getting experience that will always be helpful. He isn't likely to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

...the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her.

I like a thin book because it will Steady a Table, a leather volume because it will Strop a Razor, and a heavy book because it can be Thrown at a Cat.

I knew a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned forty percent more about cats than the man who didn't.

I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.

If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing 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.

Cats are the wildest of the tame and the tamest of the wild

It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same. There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of values.

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