"The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and uns...
The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.
~ Mark Twain ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.
More Mark Twain quotes
"There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous andshallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what youknow ain't...
"Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was i...
"April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.
"Wherever he found his speech growing too modern -- which was about every sentence or two -- he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding s...
"I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is...
"It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway.
"You can't pray a lie--I found that out.
"I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times sev...
"You gwyne to have considerable trouble in yo' life, en considerable joy. Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but ever...
"Looking' his last' upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing 'she' could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing per...
"Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!" Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer
"Today the same thing over. I've got it up the tree again.
"In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their o...
"The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the...