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Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

Mark Twain

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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
Best
Circles
Things
Narrative
Belongings
False
Robs
Among
Narratives
Literature
Delicacy
Family
Obscene
Two
Belonging
Stories
Circle

More quotes by Mark Twain

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If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.
Mark Twain
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Pilgrim's Progress , about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
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How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!
Mark Twain
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I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.
Mark Twain
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I do not wish any reward but to know I have done the right thing.
Mark Twain
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That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.
Mark Twain
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It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
Mark Twain
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It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.
Mark Twain
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It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.
Mark Twain
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Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.
Mark Twain
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Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
Mark Twain
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If you take epitaphs seriously, we ought to bury the living and resurrect the dead.
Mark Twain
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A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and -nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stock snuggles into your heart in the same way.
Mark Twain
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You can't reason with your heart it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
Mark Twain
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We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege.
Mark Twain
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An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.
Mark Twain
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Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.
Mark Twain
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When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.
Mark Twain
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To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
Mark Twain
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To be, or not to be that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life.
Mark Twain