Quote

Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane.

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
Idiots
Insanity
Talked
Novelists
Idiot
Inmates
Insane
Asylum
Thousand
Humorists
Times
Asylums

More quotes by Mark Twain

Image
I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released today.' It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.
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
In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money.
Mark Twain
Image
There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.
Mark Twain
Image
Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least.
Mark Twain
Image
More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.
Mark Twain
Image
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
Image
How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it.
Mark Twain
Image
If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.
Mark Twain
Image
If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian.
Mark Twain
Image
Love is an irreresisistible desire to be irresistibily desired.
Mark Twain
Image
To believe yourself brave is to be brave it is the one only essential thing.
Mark Twain
Image
Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick but every time you's gwyne to git well agin.
Mark Twain
Image
A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
Mark Twain
Image
What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.
Mark Twain
Image
It were not best that we should all think alike.
Mark Twain
Image
When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.
Mark Twain
Image
I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome variety is pleasing.
Mark Twain
Image
Heaven is by favor if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain.
Mark Twain
Image
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
Mark Twain