Mark Twain / Samuel Clemens

The really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great.

~ Mark Twain

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great people make you feel that you, too, can become great. 

~ Mark Twain

“A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time.”

~ Mark Twain


"A lie can travel around the world while the truth is just putting on its shoes."
~ Mark Twain

“Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”
~ Mark Twain

If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

~ Mark Twain

A dog is "der Hund"; a woman is "die Frau"; a horse is "das Pferd"; now you put that dog in the genitive case, and is he the same dog he was before? No, sir; he is "des Hundes"; put him in the dative case and what is he? Why, he is "dem Hund." Now you snatch him into the accusative case and how is it with him? Why, he is "den Hunden." But suppose he happens to be twins and you have to pluralize him- what then? Why, they'll swat that twin dog around through the 4 cases until he'll think he's an entire international dog-show all in is own person. 

I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that- I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way. 

Well, it's just the same with a cat. They start her in at the nominative singular in good health and fair to look upon, and they sweat her through all the 4 cases and the 16 the's and when she limps out through the accusative plural you wouldn't recognize her for the same being. 

Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it's goodbye cat. That's about the amount of it.

~ Mark Twain

A house without a cat, and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat, may be a perfect house, perhaps — but how can it prove its title? 

~ Samuel Langhorn Clemens (Mark Twain)

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. 

~ Mark Twain

I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the same treacheries, the same disposition to get up shindies with other royal cats, they would be laughably vain and absurd and never know it, they would be wholly inexpensive, finally, they would have as sound a divine right as any other royal house. ... The worship of royalty being founded in unreason, these graceful and harmless cats would easily become as sacred as any other royalties, and indeed more so, because it would presently be noticed that they hanged nobody, beheaded nobody, imprisoned nobody, inflicted no cruelties or injustices of any sort, and so must be worthy of a deeper love and reverence than the customary human king, and would certainly get it.

~ from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain