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
boy building closed education farmer jail public river save schools spoke stopped time
When I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.
cheer eye rivers
The Mississippi River towns are comely, clean, well built, and pleasing to the eye, and cheering to the spirit. The Mississippi Valley is as reposeful as a dreamland, nothing worldly about it . . . nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.
rivers water mexico
Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river.
years two rivers
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore, in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long, seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
skills rivers engineering
The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise...
rivers water grace
Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!
rivers denial egyptian
Denial is much more then an Egyptian River.
cease easiest ought smoking thousand
To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did, I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times.
desire dig hidden life raging rightly somewhere time treasure
There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure
caught crucified
There has been only one Christian. They caught and crucified him early.
birth grieve involved rejoice
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved
barely good whiskey
Too much of anything is bad, but too much of good whiskey is barely enough.
belief believing schoolboy
Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so
age age-and-aging dark insanity knew misfortune
(Twain on Cain): it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea