Mark Twain Humor Quotations

Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven.

The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

Wit and Humor -- if any difference, it is in duration -- lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage -- the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.

Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point.

I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars.

I reverently believe that the maker who made us all makes everything in New England, but the weather. I don't know who makes that, but I think it must be raw apprentices in the weather-clerks factory who experiment and learn how, in New England, for board and clothes, and then are promoted to make weather for countries that require a good article, and will take their custom elsewhere if they don't get it.

If there are no cigars in heaven, I shall not go.

If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.

Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect.

Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.

Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.

A home without a cat — and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat — may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?

A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.

Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more restful.

Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town?

The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.

Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.

Humor is the good natured side of a truth.

If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.

whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

A sense of humor is the one thing no one will admit to not having.

When a man's dog turns against hime, it is time for his wife to pack her trunk and go home to mamma.

The funniest things are the forbidden.

Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.

So you see, the quality of humor is not a personal or a national monopoly. It's as free as salvation, and, I am afraid, far more widely distributed. But it has its value, I think. The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel for us to know and touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them, from time to time, to blur the craggy outlines, and make the thorns less sharp and the cruelties less malignant.

I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.

Probably there is an imperceptible touch of something permanent that one feels instinctively to adhere to true humour, whereas wit may be the mere conversational shooting up of "smartness"--a bright feather, to be blown into space the second after it is launched...Wit seems to be counted a very poor relation to Humour....Humour is never artificial.

The true and lasting genius of humour does not drag you thus to boxes labelled 'pathos,' 'humour,' and show you all the mechanism of the inimitable puppets that are going to perform. How I used to laugh at Simon Tapperwit, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can't do it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour. It must be antiseptic.

What is it that strikes a spark of humor from a man? It is the effort to throw off, to fight back the burden of grief that is laid on each one of us. In youth we don't feel it, but as we grow to manhood we find the burden on our shoulders. Humor? It is nature's effort to harmonize conditions. The further the pendulum swings out over woe the further it is bound to swing back over mirth.

Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak -- like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support -- something that ought to be arrested.

English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.

The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember.

The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo.