The quotations of

Mark Twain

American author and humorist

1835–1910

151 quotes, most often on Comedy, Truth & Lies and Morality. Part of the Writers collection.

I had been to school most all the time and could spell and read and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don’t reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don’t take no stock in mathematics, anyway.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter IVIn context
- Comedy
- Education
What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XVIIn context
- Morality
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.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XVIIIn context
- Comedy
- Reading
There warn’t anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn’t any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it’s cool. If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XVIIIIn context
- Comedy
- Religion
We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XVIIIIn context
- Freedom
It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XIXIn context
- Nature
The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is⁠—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XXIIIn context
- Courage
- War & Peace
All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XXIIIIn context
- Comedy
- Power
I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XXXIIn context
- Decisions
- Morality
Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Chapter XXXIIIIn context
- Good & Evil
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it⁠—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Chapter IIIn context
- Envy
- Motivation & Goals
Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Chapter VIn context
- Change
Homely truth is unpalatable.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Chapter XXIIn context
- Truth & Lies
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.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Chapter XXIIIn context
- Character
Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome superabundance of that sort of time which is not money.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Chapter XXVIn context

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