Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyerand its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter often called "The Great American Novel"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 November 1835
CountryUnited States of America
lying law true-evil
Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. That is where the true evil lies.
insanity insane mountain
But we are all insane, anyway. Note the mountain-climbers.
cutting thinking long-ago
Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.
lying practice
Never tell a lie-except for practice.
lying bears different
There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
war southern elsewhere
In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.
girl lunch piano
The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils, but give me the banjo.
cat excellence tails
A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them.
hurt pain people
Sometimes people do get hurt
children littles charity
Children have but little charity for one another's defects
fall failure men
When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself.
upset oratory world
There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory
humanity tragedy wonderful
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.
confidence knowing sap
There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing