Wisdom Quotes from Mark Twain
You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so.
If ignorance is bliss, why isn't the world happier?
The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.
Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
An open mind leaves a chance for someone to drop a worthwhile thought in it.
So much blood has been shed by the Church because of an omission from the Gospel: “Ye shall be indifferent as to what your neighbor's religion is.” Not merely tolerant of it, but indifferent to it. Divinity is claimed for many religions; but no religion is great enough or divine enough to add that new law to its code.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
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I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72.
Comparison is the death of joy.
If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it.
The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.
There is no security in life, only opportunity.
If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.
You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs.
Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it.
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. There is nothing more satisfying than that sense of being completely "at home" in your own skin. When you achieve that as a natural state of "being", then you can finally look beyond yourself and fully contribute all your talents to the world.
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We have the best government that money can buy.
To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals.
Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason.
When the doctrine of allegiance to party can utterly up-end a man's moral constitution and make a temporary fool of him besides, what excuse are you going to offer for preaching it, teaching it, extending it, perpetuating it? Shall you say, the best good of the country demands allegiance to party? Shall you also say it demands that a man kick his truth and his conscience into the gutter, and become a mouthing lunatic, besides?
We teach them to take their patriotism at second-hand; to shout with the largest crowd without examining into the right or wrong of the matter -- exactly as boys under monarchies are taught and have always been taught. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place -- the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else's keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan.
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.
When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends.
The truth hurts, but silence kills.
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I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.
Just because you’re taught that something’s right and everyone believes it’s right, it don’t make it right.
It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.
How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again!
Education is what you must acquire without any interference from your schooling.
Man is a Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion--several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven....The higher animals have no religion. And we are told that they are going to be left out in the Hereafter. I wonder why? It seems questionable taste.
There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.
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If we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear.
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.
A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.
The ability to find solutions to life's challenges is what makes us grow as a person.
They did not know it was impossible so they did it.
Reality can be beaten with enough imagination.
Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.
Love your enemy, it will scare the hell out of them.
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