Mark Twain Quotes on Life, Travel, Politics, Education, Truth and Love

There are a thousand excuses for failure but never a good reason.

In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer.

Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution—these can lift at a colossal humbug—push it a little—weaken it a little, century by century, but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

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

Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

Who prays for satan? . Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most? .

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

Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.

Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't.

A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.