I spent quite a lot of my morning fighting the internet about a misattributed Twain quote. More on that experience in an upcoming Writers' Houses post, but I thought we should hang out with some better quotes that are actually real.
1. There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice. - Following the Equator
2. I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts. I don't know anything that mars good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature. I love all literature, and as long as I am a doctor of literature--I have suggested to you for twenty years I have been diligently trying to improve my own literature, and now, by virtue of the University of Oxford, I mean to doctor everybody else's. - Speech to the Savage Club, London, 7/6/1907
3. Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about. - More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
4. Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved. - Pudd'nhead Wilson
5. Wit and Humor--if any difference it is in duration--lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, brief, and can do damage--the other fools along and enjoys the elaboration. - Mark Twain's Notebook
6. I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. ... There are subtleties which I cannot master at all,--the confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me,--and this adverb plague is one of them. ... Yes, there are things which we cannot learn, and there is no use in fretting about it. I cannot learn adverbs; and what is more I won't. - "Reply to a Boston Girl," Atlantic Monthly, June 1880
7. Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered--either by themselves or by others. - Autobiography of Mark Twain
8. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it--namely, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
9. Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person. - Notebook, 1898
10. 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. - Mark Twain's Notebook