Mark Twain Dr Quotations

This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.

For we were little Christian children and early learned the value of forbidden fruit.

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.

The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit - how it grows! what a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment, how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies - oh, yes, and how soon and how easily our dream-life and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together that we can't quite tell which is which, anymore.

And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows

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.

Inherently, each one of us has the substance within to achieve whatever our goals and dreams define. What is different for each of us is the training, education, knowledge and insight to utilize what we already have.

Children have but little charity for one another's defects

This is the fairest picture on our planet, the most enchanting to look upon, the most satisfying to the eye and spirit. To see the sun sink down, drowned in his pink and purple and golden floods, and overwhelm Florence with tides of color that make all the sharp lines dim and faint and turn the solid city to a city of dreams, is a sight to stir the coldest nature, and make a sympathetic one drunk with ecstasy.

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

In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. . . . There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; . . . she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery.

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.

A dream...I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit.

It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him.

All you drunkards: Put down the intoxicating Vanity Metrics.

Optimist: day-dreamer in his small clothes.

There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad.

Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. To live a fulfilled life, we need to keep creating the "what is next", of our lives. Without dreams and goals there is no living, only merely existing, and that is not why we are here.

Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream.

I purpose publishing these Letters here in the world before I return to you. Two editions. One, unedited, for Bible readers and their children; the other, expurgated, for persons of refinement

Always obey your parents - when they are present.

Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough.

Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.

Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools always speak the truth. The deduction is plain: adults and wise persons never speak it.

After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.

Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.

Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over.

Geniuses are people who dash off weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates a man to ineffable speres [sic] far above the vulgar world, & fills his soul with a regal contempt for the gross & sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.

A coin, sleeve button, or a collar button dropped in a bedroom will hide itself and be hard to find. A handkerchief in bed 'can't' be found.

It is a shameful thing to insult a child.

Protestant parents still keep a Bible handy in the house, so that the children can study it, and one of the first things the little boys and girls learn is to be righteous and holy and not piss against the wall. They study those passages more than they study any others, except those which incite to masturbation. Those they hunt out and study in private.

Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it.

No temperance society which is well officered and which has the real good of our fellow-men in view, will ever get drunk save in the seclusion of its temperance hall.

Demagogue--a vessel containing beer and other liquids.

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

Explore. Dream. Discover.

We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.

More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent.

How slow and still the time did drag along.

A brown spotted lady-bug climbed the dizzy height of a grass blade, and Tom bent down close to it and said, "Lady-bug, lady-bug, fly away home, your house is on fire, your children's alone," and she took wing and went off to see about it -- which did not surprise the boy, for he knew of old that this insect was credulous about conflagrations, and he had practised upon its simplicity more than once.

I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion.

I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.

I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children.

The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it.

It is a time when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death. It is a time when one is filled with vague longings; when one dreams of flight to peaceful islands in the remote solitudes of the sea, or folds his hands and says, What is the use of struggling, and toiling and worrying any more? let us give it all up.

Everybody lies...every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception.

Don't wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality

Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.

You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shield it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God's treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them.

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

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

You can tell German wine from vinegar by the label.

I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it.

Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled.

Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink - under any circumstances.

There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!

Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him.

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)

Last week I stated that this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister and now wish to withdraw that statement.

In 'Huckleberry Finn,' I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.

It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us - dreamers and indolent... It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich - these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.

Providence protects children and idiots. I know because I have tested it.

The system of refusing the mere act of drinking and leaving the desire in full force, is unintelligent war tactics, it seems to me

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

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

We have nine children now half boys and half girls.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

Don't dream your life, but live your dream

Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself.

Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.

If we could imagine such a man, that is a man who could invent the fly and send him out on his mission and furnish him with his orders: Depart into the uttermost corners of the earth and, diligently do your appointed work. Persecute the sick child, settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting, worry and fret and madden the worn and tried mother who watches by the child and humbly prays for mercy and relief with the pathetic faith of the deceived and the unteachable.

Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress and some would lose all of it.

I cherish the dreams of yesterday and dare not dwell on the err's of my past whose fate has been long decided, and effect I can not change. For the dreams of yesterday are the challenges of today, and the hope for tomorrow.

My advice to girls: first, don't smoke to excess; second, don't drink to excess; third, don't marry to excess.

Ours is a mongrel language which started with a child's vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smo

The rain is famous for falling on the just and unjust alike, but if I had the management of such affairs I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust out doors I would drown him

There is this trouble about special providences namely, there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to be the beneficiary. In the case of the children, the bears, and the prophet, the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, because they got the children.

When angry, count to a hundred.

Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.

A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.

Time spent with your children is time wisely spent.

Don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always happens?

Children and fools always speak the truth

But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie.

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates - 1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion