Quote

I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.

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
Spencer
Great
Dying
Milton
Dead
Mentioned
Name
Authors
Feeling
Names
Shakespeare
Feelings
Greatness
Wells
Sorry
Chaucer
Well
Habit

More quotes by 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
How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank.
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
Public Servant: Persons chosen by the people to distribute the graft.
Mark Twain
Image
When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.
Mark Twain
Image
Men are easily dealt with--but when you get the women started, you are in for it, you know.
Mark Twain
Image
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it.
Mark Twain
Image
Bridgeport? Said I. Camelot, Said he.
Mark Twain
Image
The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you.
Mark Twain
Image
I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well.
Mark Twain
Image
One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one.
Mark Twain
Image
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Mark Twain
Image
All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.
Mark Twain
Image
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
Mark Twain
Image
It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell.
Mark Twain
Image
English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.
Mark Twain
Image
There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press
Mark Twain
Image
Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned
Mark Twain
Image
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
Mark Twain
Image
The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
Mark Twain