Quote

One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one.

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
Earn
Assume
Assuming
Keep
Character
Firsts
First
Must

More quotes by Mark Twain

Image
Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.
Mark Twain
Image
Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.
Mark Twain
Image
As for the dinosaur - But Noah's conscience was easy it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal and America had not then been discovered.
Mark Twain
Image
When the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface
Mark Twain
Image
I have learned that human existence is essentially tragic. It is only the love of God, disclosed and enacted in Christ, that redeems the human tragedy and makes it tolerable. No, more than tolerable. Wonderful.
Mark Twain
Image
Start it at no particular time of your life wander at your free will all over your life talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale.
Mark Twain
Image
I like Joan of Arc best of all my books and it is the best I know it perfectly well.
Mark Twain
Image
I will remark in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is hogwash
Mark Twain
Image
None but an ass pays a compliment and asks a favour at the same time. There are many asses.
Mark Twain
Image
But old fools is the biggest fools there is.
Mark Twain
Image
The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.
Mark Twain
Image
We must put up with clothes as they are they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us to advertise what we wear them to conceal.
Mark Twain
Image
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Mark Twain
Image
And how moving is the eloquence of the untaught when it is the heart that is speaking!
Mark Twain
Image
Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.
Mark Twain
Image
We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.
Mark Twain
Image
To gnaw on is human, towards digest, divine.
Mark Twain
Image
Training- training is everything training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature it is folly there is no such thing as nature what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own they are transmitted to us, trained into us.
Mark Twain
Image
None of us can be as great as God, but any of us can be as good.
Mark Twain
Image
Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man.
Mark Twain