I need Mark Twain quotes!!!!?

Question

I'm pretending to be Mark Twain for this project i have to do in school and i have to talk about his life and stuff like that and i need some quotes that i can like pu in there. Like one about school, family, love, and life.
I also need suggestions about how to act like him, like what was his personality??

Answer 1

Mark Twain's real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens. (Mark Twain was his pseudonym.) Apparently, he had "keen wit and incisive satire." During his lifetime, he became friends with presidents, artists, European royalty, and fellow writers. His work garnered much praise from both critics and peers. (For more, see links below.)

Quotes: "Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest."

"Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more. "

"A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. "

"Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge."

"My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it."

"Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside."

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up."

I've included several links below that should help.

Answer 2

"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."

-Mark Twain



Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear--not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say it is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word. Consider the flea!--incomparably the bravest of all the creatures of God, if ignorance of fear were courage. Whether you are asleep or awake he will attack you, caring nothing for the fact that in bulk and strength you are to him as are the massed armies of the earth to a sucking child; he lives both day and night and all days and nights in the very lap of peril and the immediate presence of death, and yet is no more afraid than is the man who walks the streets of a city that was threatened by an earthquake ten centuries before. When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who "didn't know what fear was," we ought always to add the flea--and put him at the head of the procession.

-Mark Twain,



Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

-Mark Twain,



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

-Mark Twain



"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect."

-Mark Twain



I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases — the dances are precisely the same. You have only to spin around with frightful velocity and steer clear of the furniture. This has a charming and bewildering effect. You catch glimpses of a confused and whirling multitude of people, and above them a row of distracted fiddlers extending entirely around the room. The waltz and the polka are very exhilarating — to use a mild term — amazingly exhilarating.

-Mark Twain 1862



"The report of my death was an exaggeration."

-Mark Twain, After reading his own obituary, June 2, 1897



By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward--you will never get her full confidence again.

-Mark Twain



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 a man. -Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson



"It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them."

-Mark Twain



The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

-Mark Twain, What Is Man?



“I am 34 and she is 24; I am young and very handsome (I make this statement with the fullest confidence, for I got it from her,) and she is much the most beautiful girl I ever saw (I said that before she was anything to me, and so it is worthy of all belief) and she is the best girl, and the sweetest, and the gentlest, and the daintiest, and the most modest and unpretentious, and the wisest in all things she should be wise in and the most ignorant in all matters it would not grace her to know, and she is sensible and quick, and loving and faithful, forgiving, full of charity…. She is the most perfect gem of womankind that ever I saw in my life -- and I will stand by that remark until I die.”

-Mark Twain, in a Letter to Will Bowen shortly after his marriage, quoted in “Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic”, by Peter Stoneley, page 43,



Who prays for Satan? Who, in 1,800 years, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

-Mark Twain



some of my favorites .....he sure loved Cats :o)

Answer 3

Heeeyyy!

Here are some Mark Twain quotes :)



Life

-"It is the epitome of life. The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity."

-"It is human life. We are blown upon the world; we float buoyantly upon the summer air a little while, complacently showing off our grace of form and our dainty iridescent colors; then we vanish with a little puff, leaving nothing behind but a memory--and sometimes not even that. I suppose that at those solemn times when we wake in the deeps of the night and reflect, there is not one of us who is not willing to confess that he is really only a soap-bubble, and as little worth the making."

-"Life: we laugh and laugh, then cry and cry, then feebler laugh, then die."

-"Life is at best a dream and at worst a nightmare from which you cannot escape."

-"What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it."



School

-"Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog."

-"All schools, all colleges, have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal, valuable knowledge. The theological knowledge which they conceal cannot justly be regarded as less valuable than that which they reveal. That is, when a man is buying a basket of strawberries it can profit him to know that the bottom half of it is rotten"

-"Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned."

-"Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge."



Love

-"Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century."

-"The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing."

-"The course of free love never runs smooth. I suppose we have all tried it."

-"Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast."



Family

-."..a family brought love, and distributed it among many objects, and intensified it, and this engendered wearing cares and anxieties, and when the objects suffered or died the miseries and anxieties multiplied and broke the heart and shortened life..."

-"When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years."

-"My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it."



Personality

-Characteristics: integrity, sense-of-humor, incisive satire and initiative

-Funny, out-going, cooperative, charming and witty, humerous, and insightful

-Later in life he changed..."As Twain's career progressed, he seemed to become increasingly removed from the humorous, cocky image of his younger days. More and more of his works came to express the gloomy view that all human motives are ultimately selfish. These works also reflect Twain's lifelong doubts about religion and his belief that all human acts are predetermined and free will is an illusion."





Two great site for more information about Mark's life.

They both offer a lot of good information. The 1st is a little bit more difficult to read but it's just due to how the pages layout

-http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/twainbio.html

-http://www.marktwainhouse.org/theman/bio.shtml