Quote

There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

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
People
Age
Attacks
Lives
Sooner
Human
Attempt
Humans
According
Whole
Violent
Sufferer
Things
Later
Measles
Never
Beings
Sufferers
Like
Poetry
Mild

More quotes by Mark Twain

Image
You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.
Mark Twain
Image
I'm pushing 60 years of age...and that's enough exercise for me.
Mark Twain
Image
Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar.
Mark Twain
Image
Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. You cannot eliminate habits that no longer serve you. You can only replace them with new habits that support your goals. Moment by moment, you need to live with awareness and structure the habits that you include or exclude in your days.
Mark Twain
Image
The reason most people don't go to church is because they've already been.
Mark Twain
Image
We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity.
Mark Twain
Image
Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
Mark Twain
Image
The Mississippi River will always have its own way no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise.
Mark Twain
Image
I couldn't bear to think about it and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else.
Mark Twain
Image
I pledged myself to smoke but one cigar a day. I kept the cigar waiting until bedtime, then I had a luxurious time with it. But desire persecuted me every day and all day long. I found myself hunting for larger cigars...within the month my cigar had grown to such proportions I could have used it as a crutch.
Mark Twain
Image
The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.
Mark Twain
Image
A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on.
Mark Twain
Image
He had only one vanity he thought he could give advice better than any other person.
Mark Twain
Image
Well, no doubt it's a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed.
Mark Twain
Image
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt.
Mark Twain
Image
Heroine: Girl in a book who is saved from drowning by a hero and marries him next week, but if it was to be over again ten years later it is likely she would rather have a life-belt and he would rather have her have it. Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.
Mark Twain
Image
The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
Mark Twain
Image
But we are all insane, anyway ... The suicides seem to be the only sane people.
Mark Twain
Image
There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle afer cycle, by force and bloodshed.
Mark Twain
Image
But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
Mark Twain