The collection / 580 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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580 results · Page 12 of 25Play this collection ▷

01c. 1872 AD

A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies.

Mark Twain / quote

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02c. 1872 AD

Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.

Mark Twain / quote

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03c. 1872 AD

I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on the hearth on a winter's evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream... I know how the nuts taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider, and doughnuts, make old people's tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting.

Mark Twain / quote

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04c. 1872 AD

New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin.

Mark Twain / quote

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05c. 1872 AD

A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoed with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place.

Mark Twain / quote

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06c. 1872 AD

Mornings before daylight I slipped into cornfields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things if you was meaning to pay them back some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it.

Mark Twain / quote

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07c. 1872 AD

It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand.

Mark Twain / quote

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08c. 1872 AD

Wherever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.

Mark Twain / quote

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09c. 1872 AD

In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters.

Mark Twain / quote

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10c. 1872 AD

Adam is fading out. It is on account of Darwin and that crowd. I can see that he is not going to last much longer. There's a plenty of signs. He is getting belittled to a germ—a little bit of a speck that you can't see without a microscope powerful enough to raise a gnat to the size of a church.('The Refuge of the Derelicts' collected in Mark Twain and John Sutton Tuckey, The Devil's Race-Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1980), 340-41. - 1980)

Mark Twain / quote

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11c. 1872 AD

Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness.

Mark Twain / quote

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12c. 1872 AD

I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed.

Mark Twain / quote

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13c. 1872 AD

You will be more disappointed in life by the things that you do not do than by the things that you do.

Mark Twain / quote

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14c. 1872 AD

Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option.

Mark Twain / quote

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15c. 1872 AD

I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.

Mark Twain / quote

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16c. 1872 AD

It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells.

Mark Twain / quote

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17c. 1872 AD

If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it.

Mark Twain / quote

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18c. 1872 AD

The government is merely a servant―merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them.

Mark Twain / quote

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19c. 1872 AD

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.

Mark Twain / quote

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20c. 1872 AD

Sometimes I wish we could hear of a country that’s out of kings.

Mark Twain / quote

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21c. 1872 AD

No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.

Mark Twain / quote

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22c. 1872 AD

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.

Mark Twain / quote

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23c. 1872 AD

Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

Mark Twain / quote

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24c. 1872 AD

The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.

Mark Twain / quote

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