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
years insanity form
No one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms-fortunately harmless forms as a rule.
insanity insane inmates
Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane...
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.
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
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
optimism optimist
Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists
honesty men economist
I am not an economist. I am an honest man!
pessimistic pessimist optimist
Pessimist: The optimist who didn't arrive.