"The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and uns...
Loose and forbear!
More Mark Twain quotes
"Wherever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding s...
"It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.
"You can't pray a lie--I found that out.
"You gwyne to have considerable trouble in yo' life, en considerable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but ever...
"Looking' his last' upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing 'she' could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing per...
"In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their o...
"Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of...
"This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.
"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
"A dog is der Hund the dog; a women is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the sa...
"The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.
"Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of t...
"The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me wi...
"A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.