Mark Twain

She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.

The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman’s construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. During twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle – yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart.

I have not a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming vices.

He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think – yes, it was three; I attended their funerals.

To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.

To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else – these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.

A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.

There are only two ways of telling the complete truth–anonymously and posthumously.

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened.

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn’t.

It is a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth.’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.

It is more from carelessness about truth than from intentionally lying that there is so much falsehood in the world.

Truth is so hard to tell, it sometimes needs fiction to make it plausible.

The truth knocks on the door and you say, Go away, I’m looking for the truth, and so it goes away. Puzzling.

If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.

Tell me anyway–Maybe I can find the truth by comparing the lies.

Truth isn’t truth.

It is a pleasure to stand upon the shore, and to see ships tost upon the sea: a pleasure to stand in the window of a castle, and to see a battle and the adventures thereof below: but no pleasure is comparable to standing upon the vantage ground of truth… and to see the errors, and wanderings, and mists, and tempests, in the vale below.

When in doubt tell the truth.

Man has always sacrificed truth to his vanity, comfort and advantage. He lives by makebelieve.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.