Mark Twain wit and wisdom
famous and familiar quotations

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was born in 1835. He became employed in the printing industry prior to his becoming a teenager (1847-57) and later worked as a Mississippi river-boat pilot (1857-1861). The pseudonym Mark Twain in fact derives from a commonplace navigational call on the Missisippi river meaning that the river boat was operating in two fathoms of water.

Another career change saw him undertake duties as a newspaper editor and a newspaper reporter. In 1867 he visited Europe and the Middle East - these travels provided material for his "The Innocents Abroad" (1869) which established his reputation as a humourist.

Two of his later works "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884) are firmly placed amongst the world classics. In his later life he suffered pecuniary embarassments following financial speculations and also more personal loss in the early deaths of his wife and two of his daughters.

Mark Twain died in 1910.

Here are some famous quotations and quotable quotes from the works of Mark Twain:-

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre,
but they are more deadly in the long run.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

Get your facts first, and then you can distort 'em as much as you please.

Speaking of Cecil Rhodes:-

I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when the time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.

Man is the only animal that blushes.
Or needs to.

Another Mark Twain quote is to be found on the download version of our Introductory Quotations page.

Introductory quotations

Oscar Wilde

Wordsworth

Yeats

Start of Mark Twain wit and wisdom
famous and familiar quotations page

Mark Twain wit and wisdom famous and familiar quotations

Mark Twain wit and wisdom
famous and familiar quotations