Mark Twain Quotes on Humor

23 quotes

  1. The funniest things are the forbidden.

  2. Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

  3. The report of my death was an exaggeration.

  4. Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.

  5. [The human race], in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon - laughter.

  6. The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.

  7. I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.

  8. Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.

  9. There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.

  10. To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin.

  11. The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

  12. He [Mark Twain] spoke of humor, and thought it must be one of the chief attributes of God. He cited plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their characteristics. These he declared were God's jokes.

  13. Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

  14. I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

  15. All you have to fear is your mother's cooking.

  16. Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

  17. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

  18. I have found solace in profanity unexcelled even by prayer.

  19. I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly

  20. I've never killed a man, but I've read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction.

  21. Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

  22. The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

  23. I'm sorry this letter is so long, but I did not have time to make it shorter.

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