Quote

Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.

Mark Twain

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Mark Twain
Age: 74 †
Born: 1835
Born: November 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 21
Aphorist
Author
Autobiographer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Teacher
Florida
Missouri
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel L. Clemens
Samuel Clemens
Living
Best
Life
Obscurity
Competence
Worth
Existence
Happiness

More quotes by Mark Twain

Image
The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but the fly comes close.
Mark Twain
Image
I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly--except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses never, I believe, by people.
Mark Twain
Image
I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.
Mark Twain
Image
Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.
Mark Twain
Image
I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.
Mark Twain
Image
Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.
Mark Twain
Image
The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.
Mark Twain
Image
Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.
Mark Twain
Image
Every year you wait, long ago gets farther away.
Mark Twain
Image
Broad, wholesome, charitable views .. can not be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth.
Mark Twain
Image
Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out.
Mark Twain
Image
Independence-is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes.
Mark Twain
Image
Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.
Mark Twain
Image
I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
Mark Twain
Image
Italy is the home of art and swindling home of religion and moral rottenness
Mark Twain
Image
Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
Mark Twain
Image
What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth.
Mark Twain
Image
Frankness is a jewel only the young can afford it.
Mark Twain
Image
I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.
Mark Twain
Image
I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age in 1977 I shall be 142.
Mark Twain