Quote

You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure--because he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhapsbut otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman.

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
Wells
Principles
Measure
Human
Humanity
Principle
Congressman
Humans
Call
Interests
Feathers
Well
Interest
Instinct
Instincts
Whole
Church
Otherwise
Hasn
Much
Feelings
Ground
Cover
Tell
Bird
Gifts
May
Perhaps
Belong

More quotes by Mark Twain

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There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.
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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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There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
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He gossips habitually he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue.
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If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.
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Slang in a woman's mouth is not obscene, it only sounds so.
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We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.
Mark Twain
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He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed-kind of a syndicate and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that's left over.
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But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
Mark Twain
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A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
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The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.
Mark Twain
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When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.
Mark Twain
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I prefer milk because I am a Prohibitionist, but I do not go to it for inspiration.
Mark Twain
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I am dead to adverbs they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them.
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A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
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If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, As unhappy as God.
Mark Twain
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Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene
Mark Twain
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I was born modest not all over, but in spots.
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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Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
Mark Twain