Mark Twain Men Quotations [Page 2]

As soon as a man recognizes that he has drifted into age, he gets reminiscent. He wants to talk and talk; and not about the present or the future, but about his old times. For there is where the pathos of his life lies - and the charm of it. The pathos of it is there because it was opulent with treasures that are gone, and the charm of it is in casting them up from the musty ledgers and remembering how rich and gracious they were.

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.

I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good.

If I had been helping the Almighty when he created man, I would have had him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How much better to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning!

Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.

How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!

Cherimoya, the most delicious fruit known to men.

It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.

Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep 'til noon.

Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side

India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.

Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Don't be fooled by this absurd law; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him.

I do not see how astronomers can help feeling exquisitely insignificant, for every new page of the Book of the Heavens they open reveals to them more and more that the world we are so proud of is to the universe of careening globes as is one mosquito to the winged and hoofed flocks and herds that darken the air and populate the plains and forests of all the earth. If you killed the mosquito would it be missed? Verily, What is Man, that he should be considered of God?

A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read.

Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.

An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.

No church property is taxed and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit.

When the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface

In religion, India is the only millionaire... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined.

It is often the case that a man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one.

Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.

What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light.

Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of.

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

You cant reach old age by another man's road, my habits protect my life but they would assassinate you

in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time.

It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing-and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite - that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.

The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost - not another man's - is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases.

You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.

God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage

It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.

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.

So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.

We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency.

A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die.

If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.

Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time.

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.

An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.

And what is a man without energy? Nothing - nothing at all.

What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason.

We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and it's efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read-

He gossips habitually; he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue.

Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do.

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

What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.

Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar.

There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.

The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bills like everything.

A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it.

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.

Man is without doubt the most interesting fool there is. He concedes that God made the angels immune from pain and death, and that he could have been similarly kind to man, but denies that he was under any moral obligation to do so.

To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn't rich.

It is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man's.

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.

The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.

Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.

Men and women -- even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers.

What a man misses mostly in heaven is company.

You should never trust a man who has only one way to spell a word.

Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.

Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it.

Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.

I have been 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 humiliating to me.

Man is the only slave. And he is the only animal who enslaves. He has always been a slave in one form or another, and has always held other slaves in bondage under him in one way or another. In our day, he is always some man's slave for wages, and does that man's work; and this slave has other slaves under him for minor wages, and they do his work. The higher animals are the only ones who exclusively do their own work and provide their own living.

Strange is the man who practices his religion.

Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.

A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors.

The less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.

Books are the liberated spirits of men.

When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.

I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's.

Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool.

Man is the only Patriot. He sets himself apart in his own country, under his own flag, and sneers at the other nations, and keeps multitudinous uniformed assassins on hand at heavy expense to grab slices of other people's countries, and keep them from grabbing slices of his. And in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for the universal brotherhood of man - with his mouth.

A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public

The nation is divided, half patriots and half traitors, and no man can tell which from which.

Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.

...Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'

Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being "loyal" to a thousand iniquities, whereas the true loyalty should have been to themselves - in which case there would have ensured a rebellion, and the throwing off of that deceptive yoke.

I have seen an entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon of a broken leg. I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in their eyes, to bless this beneficient institution. In all my experiences of life, I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a freshly mutilated man's face when he feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right.

What is the chief end of man?-to get rich. In what way?-dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one and only true? Money is God. Gold and Greenbacks and Stock-father, son, and ghosts of same, three persons in one; These are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.

How unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant

A gentleman is a man who can play the banjo, but doesn't.

No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.

The worst thing you can do to a man is to tell him he can have what he wants.

An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect.

Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had to learn more than any one man ought to learn; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours.

A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt

Gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica.

Pilgrim's Progress , about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.

Not a single right is indestructible: a new might can at any time abolish it, hence, man possesses not a single permanent right. God is Might (and He is shifty, malicious, and uncertain).

When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.

Men are easily dealt with--but when you get the women started, you are in for it, you know.

What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension.

In truth I care little about any party's politics—the man behind it is the important thing.

My mind changes often ... People who have no mind can easily be steadfast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.

The sole impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs.... It is our only spur, our whip, our goad, our impelling power; we have no other.

To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology.