Mark Twain Men Quotations [Page 3]

It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.

It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.

Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

He was such a good man that people hated to see him coming.

Pessimism is only the name that men of weak nerve give to wisdom.

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom when he can no longer be led by the nose.

I repeat, sir, that in whatever position you place a woman she is an ornament to society and a treasure to the world. As a sweetheart, she has few equals and no superiors; as a cousin, she is convenient; as a wealthy grandmother with an incurable distemper, she is precious; as a wet-nurse, she has no equal among men. What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.

If all men were rich, all men would be poor.

I begin to see that a man's got to be in his own heaven to be happy.

Behind every successful man, there is a woman - And behind every unsuccessful man, there are two.

Hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, political, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies.

Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.

The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf.

If men bore children, there would only be one born in each family.

Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval - a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death.

I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating.

The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.

A man may have no bad habits and have worse

I am not an economist. I am an honest man!

When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself.

...we all know that in all matters of mere opinion that [every] man is insane-just as insane as we are...we know exactly where to put our finger upon his insanity: it is where his opinion differs from ours....All Democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it. None but the Republicans. All the Republicans are insane, but only the Democrats can perceive it. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.

What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery!

The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.

There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angelship.

Adam was the luckiest man in the world. He had no mother-in-law.

What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut.

Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees.

It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.

Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it.

Armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it.

No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me. I am the only judge... There are no standards--no real standards. Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him.

There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.

By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved.

There are no wild animals until man makes them so.

I am persuaded that the world has been tricked into adopting some false and most pernicious notions about consistency - and to such a degree that the average man has turned the rights and wrongs of things entirely around and is proud to be "consistent," unchanging, immovable, fossilized, where it should be his humiliation.

We had an abundance of mangoes, papaias and bananas here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It has a soft pulp, like a pawpaw, and is eaten with a spoon.

If I were going to construct a God I would furnish him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present One lacks... He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.

Man is the only animal that deals in that atorcity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind.

The average man is what his environment and his superstitions have made him; and their function is to make him an ass. He can't add up three or four new circumstances together and perceive what they mean; it is beyond him. He is not capable of observing for himself; he has to get everything at second-hand. If what are miscalled the lower animals were as silly as man is, they would all perish from the earth in a year.

It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same. There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of values.

I thoroughly believe that any man who's got anything worthwhile to say will be heard if he only says it often enough.

When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men.

One of my theories is that the hearts of men are about alike, no matter what their skin color.

In all my travels the thing that has impressed me the most is the universal brotherhood of man-what there is of it.

Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother's path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard.

A proud man is one who waits for a vacancy in the Trinity.

The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. Man gets his through months and months of cruel torture; he will never get a set which can really be depended on 'till a dentist makes him one.

We have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only when we set out to discover "the secret of God" that our difficulties disappear.

There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it.

Life ain't about how fast you run or how high you climb, It's all about how good you bounce. A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

The Autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze.

Frankenstein took some flesh and bones and blood and made a man out of them; the man ran away and fell to raping and robbing and murdering everywhere, and Frankenstein was horrified and in despair, and said, I made him, without asking his consent, and it makes me responsible for every crime he commits. I am the criminal, he is innocent.

One day man by the slow processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and high - some billions of years hence, say.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.

Why is it that, among men, physical courage is a trait so plenteous yet moral courage is a trait so rare?

Every man is in his own person the whole human race without a detail lacking....I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born.

To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French.

He said that man’s heart was the only bad heart in the animal kingdom; that man was the only animal capable of feeling malice, envy, vindictiveness, revengefulness, hatred, selfishness, the only animal that loves drunkenness, almost the only animal that could endure personal uncleanliness and a filthy habitation, the sole animal in whom was fully developed the base instinct called patriotism, the sole animal that robs, persecutes, oppresses and kills members of his own tribe, the sole animal that steals and enslaves the members of any tribe.

You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool.

Thou shalt not commit adultry is a command which makes no distinction between the following persons. They are all required to obey it: children at birth. Children in the cradle. School children. Youths and maidens. Fresh adults. Older ones. Men and women of 40. Of 50. Of 60. Of 70. Of 80. Of 100. The command does not distribute its burden equally, and cannot. It is not hard upon the three sets of children.

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.

All I care to know about a man is that he is a human being... he can't be any worse.

The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.

Man - a figment of God's imagination.

I wonder if God created man because He was disappointed with the monkey.

Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.

The average man don't like trouble and danger.

I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me.

A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.

In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man

Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance.

Solomon, who was one of the Deity's favorites, had a copulation cabinet composed of seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines. To save his life he could not have kept two of these young creatures satisfactorily refreshed, even if he had fifteen experts to help him. Necessarily almost the entire thousand had to go hungry for years and years on a stretch. Conceive of a man hardhearted enough to look daily upon all that suffering and not be moved to mitigate it.

S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy - what would you think?

One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a women is, until after considerable acquaintance with her.

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.

But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man’s best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. 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.

I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released today.' It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.

Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide.

We can't reach old age by another man's road.

It has been reported that I was seriously ill--it was another man; dying--it was another man; dead--the other man again...As far as I can see, nothing remains to be reported, except that I have become a foreigner. When you hear it, don't you believe it. And don't take the trouble to deny it. Merely just raise the American flag on our house in Hartford and let it talk.

Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.

It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork.

Man proposes, but God blocks the game.

God puts something good and loveable in every man His hands create.

No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God--primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next.

To be busy is man's only happiness.

Men are like bank accounts. The more money, the more interest they generate.

Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.

I was an arden Hayes man, but that was natural, for I was pretty young at the time, I have since convinced myself that the political opinioins of a nation are of next to no value, in any case, but that what little rag of value they posess is to be found among the old, rather than among the young.

Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.

I was educated, I was trained, I was a Presbyterian and I knew how these things are done. I knew that in Biblical times if a man committed a sin the extermination of the whole surrounding nation-cattle and all-was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after.

We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.

I have a religion-but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.....Perhaps your religion will sustain you,will feed you-I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect-neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck.

...nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people.

We are always hearing of people who are around seeking after the Truth. I have never seen a (permanent) specimen. I think he has never lived. But I have seen several entirely sincere people who thought they were (permanent) Seekers after the Truth. They sought diligently, persistently, carefully, cautiously, profoundly, with perfect honesty and nicely adjusted judgment- until they believed that without doubt or question they had found the Truth. That was the end of the search. The man spent the rest of his hunting up shingles wherewith to protect his Truth from the weather.

I knew a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned forty percent more about cats than the man who didn't.

I'm a very old man. I've had lots of problems. Most of them never happened..!

The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, "Where is the best place to go to?" He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had its advantages--heaven for climate, and hell for society.