Mark Twain: Zitate auf Englisch (seite 31)

Mark Twain war US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller. Zitate auf Englisch.
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“My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.”

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Mark Twain buch Ein Yankee am Hofe des König Artus

Quelle: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Ch. 13.

“I started out alone to seek adventures. You don't really have to seek them—that is nothing but a phrase—they come to you.”

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Mark Twain

"Taming the Bicycle" (1917)

“His grammar is foolishly correct, offensively precise. It flaunts itself in the reader's face all along, and struts and smirks and shows off, and is in a dozen ways irritating and disagreeable. To be serious, I write good grammar myself, but not in that spirit, I am thankful to say. That is to say, my grammar is of a high order, though not at the top. Nobody's is. Perfect grammar—persistent, continuous, sustained—is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it.”

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Mark Twain

Quelle: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 120

“He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person.”

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Mark Twain buch The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg

"The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg", ch. I, in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays (1900)

“No accident ever comes late; it always arrives precisely on time.”

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Mark Twain

Quelle: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 239

“Biographies are but clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

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Mark Twain

Vol. I, p. 2
Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

“The funniest things are the forbidden.”

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Mark Twain

"Notebook 18 (February–September 1879)" in Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Vol. 2 (1975), ed. Frederick Anderson, ISBN 0520025423, p. 304

“There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

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Mark Twain

Often attributed to Twain, but he said it was attributed to Benjamin Disraeli and this itself is probably a misattribution: see Lies, damned lies, and statistics and Leonard H. Courtney. Twain did, however, popularize this saying in the United States. His attribution is in the following passage from Twain's Autobiography (1924), Vol. I, p. 246 (apparently written in Florence in 1904) http://www.york.ac.uk/depts/maths/histstat/lies.htm:
Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics".
Misattributed

“We are always anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.”

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Mark Twain

upon being told he had a good head for business, p. 378
Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010)

“There has never been a just one, never an honorable one — on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful — as usual — will shout for the war. The pulpit will — warily and cautiously — object — at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers — as earlier — but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation — pulpit and all — will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”

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Mark Twain buch The Mysterious Stranger

originally in The Chronicle of Satan (1905).
The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

“I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it. And besides, I have lived with liars so long that I have lost the tune, & a fact jars upon me like a discord.”

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Mark Twain

Quelle: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 435

“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.”

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Mark Twain

“The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance, the last half consists of the chance without the capacity. ”

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Mark Twain

“Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink— — under any circumstances.”

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Mark Twain

“The best known names in the Territory of Nevada were those belonging to these long-tailed heroes of the revolver. Orators, Governors, capitalists and leaders of the legislature enjoyed a degree of fame, but it seemed local and meagre when contrasted with the fame of such men as Sam Brown, Jack Williams, Billy Mulligan, Farmer Pease, Sugarfoot Mike, Pock-Marked Jake, El Dorado Johnny, Jack McNabb, Joe McGee, Jack Harris, Six-fingered Pete, etc., etc.”

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Mark Twain buch Roughing It

Chapter XLVIII, p. 344 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo1.ark:/13960/t0xp7k74t&view=1up&seq=364' (published 1872)
Roughing It (1872)

“For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.”

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Mark Twain

Quelle: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 210

“When Adam ate the apple in the Garden and learned how to multiply and replenish, the other animals learned the Art, too, by watching Adam. It was cunning of them, it was neat; for they got all that was worth having out of the apple without tasting it and afflicting themselves with the disastrous Moral Sense, the parent of all the immoralities.”

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Mark Twain buch Letters from the Earth

Letters from the Earth (1909)

“From the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick to receive the candle. But man is only briefly competent:…After fifty his performance is of poor quality; the intervals between are wide, and its satisfactions of no great quality to either party; whereas his great-grandmother is as good as new.”

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Mark Twain buch Letters from the Earth

Letters from the Earth (1909)

“This is indeed India! the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations — the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will.”

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Mark Twain buch Following the Equator

Ch. XXXVIII http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5811/5811-h/5811-h.htm
Following the Equator (1897)