Mark Twain Up Quotations

When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.

I have tried getting up early, and I have tried getting up late-and the latter agrees with me best.

It has taken a weary long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can.

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

Go to bed early, get up early-this is wise.

I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up...These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with.

That is the way of the scientist. He will spend thirty years in building up a mountain range of facts with the intent to prove a certain theory; then he is so happy with his achievement that as a rule he overlooks the main chief fact of all-that all his accumulation proves an entirely different thing.

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.

I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.

Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!" Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer

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.

No child should be permitted to grow up without exercise for imagination. It enriches life for him. It makes things wonderful and beautiful.

My faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened.

That is their way, those plagues, those scientists - peg, peg, peg - dig, dig, dig - plod, plod, plod. I wish I could catch a cargo of them for my place; it would be an economy. Yes, for years, you see. They never give up. Patience, hope, faith, perseverance; it is the way of all the breed.