Quote

I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly--except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses never, I believe, by people.

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
Often
Hardly
Speak
French
Ever
Excited
Frenchman
Believe
Using
Frenchmen
Never
Horse
Timidity
People
Except
Horses
Perhaps
Mistaken
Language
Noticed

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More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat.
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Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training the odds are too heavy.
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I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.
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If you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!
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Man is a marvelous curiosity...he thinks he is the Creator's pet...he even believes the Creator loves him has passion for him sits up nights to admire him yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks he listens. Isn't it a quaint idea.
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It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain.
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After my marriage she edited everything I wrote. And what is more, she not only edited my works, she edited me.
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Our lives, our liberty, and our property are never in greater danger than when Congress is in session.
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When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
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There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.
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In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.
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A man may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands.
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A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
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The sole impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs.... It is our only spur, our whip, our goad, our impelling power we have no other.
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God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage
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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.
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If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out and I don't know but more so.
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I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't know why.
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I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it.
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My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies.
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