“Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other.”
To the Young People's Society, Greenpoint Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn (February 16, 1901).
Variante: Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
Unsourced in The Philosophy of Mark Twain: The Wit and Wisdom of a Literary Genius (2014) by David Graham
Disputed
marginal note in Moncure D. Conway's Sacred Anthology
quoted by Albert Bigelow Paine in Mark Twain: A Biography (1912)
“All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure.”
Mark Twain's Notebook, 1887
Letter to Cordelia Welsh Foote (Cincinnati), 2 December 1887. Letter reprinted http://www.twainquotes.com/Success.html in Benjamin De Casseres's When Huck Finn Went Highbrow https://www.worldcat.org/title/when-huck-finn-went-highbrow/oclc/2514292 (1934)
“History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.”
Origins unclear. Earliest known match in print comes from 1970, in a collection called “Neo Poems” by Canadian artist John Robert Colombo, who recalled reading it sometime in the 1960s. Twain did say "History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends." in the 1874 edition of “The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day”. A thematic precursor, "History May Not Repeat, But It Looks Alike", appears in a 1941 article by Chicago Tribune in Illinois. (Source: Quote Investigator https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/01/12/history-rhymes/)
Misattributed
“Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.”
As quoted in "An Interview with Mark Twain" http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kipling/rudyard/seatosea/chapter37.html, From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel (1899) by Rudyard Kipling, Ch. 37, p. 180
Commonly paraphrased as: "First get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure."
“I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.”
Quelle: The Innocents Abroad (1869), Ch. 7
“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.”
Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940) edited by Bernard DeVoto
