Who is Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), called “the Great American Novel”, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876).
Twain grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which would later provide the setting for Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He apprenticed with a printer. He also worked as a typesetter and contributed articles to his older brother Orion’s newspaper. After toiling as a printer in various cities, he became a master riverboat pilot on the Mississippi River, before heading west to join Orion. He was a failure at gold mining, so he next turned to journalism. While a reporter, he wrote a humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” which proved to be very popular and brought him nationwide attention. His travelogues were also well-received. Twain had found his calling.
He achieved great success as a writer and public speaker. His wit and satire earned praise from critics and peers, and he was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens Quotes
1. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
2. Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
3. Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
4. The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.
5. Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well.
6. Classic′ – a book which people praise and don’t read.
7. I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
8. The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time
9. A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
10. Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it.
11. Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
12. In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them.
13. Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
14. Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
15. Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
16. I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
17. God created war so that Americans would learn geography.
18. I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.
19. I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.
20. But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?
21. The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
22. Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
23. Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
24. I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.
25. Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.
26. Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else.
27. What would men be without women? Scarce, sir…mighty scarce.
28. Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
29. When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
30. Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
31. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
32. Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.
33. You can’t depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
34. If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man.
35. Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
36. If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re mis-informed.
37. Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.
38. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.
39. The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.
40. Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
41. It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
42. I’ve lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
43. Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.
44. The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up.
45. Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
46. You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?
47. The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.
48. The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself.
49. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
50. The secret to getting ahead is getting started.
51. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
52. A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.
53. Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
54. If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much
55. The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
56. I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read Pride and Prejudice I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
57. Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
58. A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
59. Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most.
60. I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
