A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

— Mark Twain

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes, and he is turned out for what he knows.

— Mark Twain

A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

— Mark Twain

A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.

— Mark Twain

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns a lesson he can learn in no other way.

— Mark Twain

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

— Mark Twain

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results. So he goes to work. To write a novel? No--that is a thought which comes later; in the beginning he is only proposing to tell a little tale, a very little tale, a six-page tale. But as it is a tale which he is not acquainted with, and can only find out what it is by listening as it goes along telling itself, it is more than apt to go on and on and on till it spreads itself into a book. I know about this, because it has happened to me so many times.

— Mark Twain

A mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering from the griddle; dusted with fragrant pepper; enriched with little melting bits of butter of the most impeachable freshness and genuineness; the precious juices of the meat trickling out and joining the gravy, archipelagoes with mushrooms; a township or two of tender, yellowish fat gracing an out-lying district of this ample county of beefsteak; the long white bone which divides the sirloin from the tenderloin still in its place.

— Mark Twain

And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars--all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose--there is no such war in the history of the race.

— Mark Twain

And so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied.

— Mark Twain