Mark Twain Mind Quotations

When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved

Man's mind clumsily and tediously and laboriously patches little trivialities together and gets a result - such as it is

By his father he is English, by his mother he is American - to my mind the blend which makes the perfect man

The smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.

The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nations, and from the mass of the nation only-not from its privileged classes.

To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity.

From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one -- to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF.

Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind.

It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it.

Troubles are only mental; it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them.

There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled.

A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.

What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.

You are about as happy as you make up your mind to be.

Names are not always what they seem.

If it is a Miracle, any sort of evidence will answer, but if it is a Fact, proof is necessary

Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles

Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time.

The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter...

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.

The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.

In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities.

There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it.

The partitions of the houses were so thin we could hear the women occupants of adjoining rooms changing their minds.

Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice.

The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind.

Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.

I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean.

Take your mind out every now and then and dance on it. It is getting all caked up.

Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged.

Wherefore being all of one mind, we do highly resolve that government of the grafted by the grafter for the grafter shall not perish from the earth.

It's a good thing for a dog to have fleas; keeps his mind off being a dog.

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.

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

Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds.

a fully belly is little worth where the mind is starved.

We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision true--humor.

I don't mind what the opposition say of me so long as they don't tell the truth about me. But when they descend to telling the truth about me I consider that this is taking an unfair advantage.

But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it.

Definite speech means clarity of mind.

In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.