Mark Twain Quotes

Human beings are glorious and preposterous characters.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

All laws which can be broken without any injury to another, are counted but a laughing-stock, and are so far from bridling the desires and lusts of men, that on the contrary they stimulate them.

Whether man is a product of evolution or is 'created' becomes the question, 'Who is man? Is he part of the world or something different from it?'

Sex is God's joke on the human race ... if we didn't have sex to make us ridiculous, She would have had to think up something else instead.

Absurdity is one of the most human things about us: a manifestation of our most advanced and interesting characteristics.

There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus!

What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and god-like reason to fust in us unused.

You're a poem?' I repeated. She chewed her lower lip. 'If you want. I am a poem, or I am a pattern, or a race of people whose whose world was swallowed by the sea.' 'Isn't it hard to be three things at the same time?' 'What's your name?' 'Enn.' 'So you are Enn,' she said. 'And you are a male. And you are a biped. Is it hard to be three things at the same time?

I wanted to tell the book thief many things, about beauty and brutality. But what could I tell her about those things that she didn't already know? I wanted to explain that I am constantly overestimating and underestimating the human race - that rarely do I ever simply estimate it. I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

The very thing about people that makes the human race interesting is also the thing that makes it so hard to get anything done without the most horrible confusions: no two people think exactly the same way about anything.

Could anything be absurder than a man? The animal who knows everything about himself--except why he was born and the meaning of his unique existence.

As a human race, we have good people and bad people, and everyone has agendas.

[Whenever] you get near the human race, there's layers and layers of nonsense.

in our ordinaryness we are most bizarre.

An infinite personality is an infinite impossibility.

Ah, in every age there is always some new wonder to astound mankind until they grow accustomed to it and lose interest.

The desire for order is the only order in the world.

Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do?

It is one of the peculiar truths of life that people often say things that they know full well are ridiculous.

People look like rivers very much: water is everywhere the same, but the rivers are narrow, fast, wide, pure, cold, muddy and warm. The people are the same. They have the rudiment of every human habit in them and they behave according to them. Sometimes they even do not look like themselves, but they still stay whatever they are.

People have a sense of humor, even if it's not a good one, and everybody has stakes.

The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.

Novels, like human beings, usually have their beginnings in the dark.

Good Lord, what is man! for as simple he looks, Do but try to develop his books and his crooks, With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil, All in all, he's a problem must puzzle the devil.