41 Samuel Langhorne Clemens Quotes on Psychology

Samuel Langhorne Clemens quotes on psychology

7. I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices.

12. Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.

22. An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar.

33. [A] classic - something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

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

45. A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.

48. It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.

50. I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.

54. We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God.

57. I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.

59. A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.

61. Always acknowledge a fault frankly. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you opportunity to commit more.

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

69. Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.

70. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it - namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.

74. To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

75. She makes me get up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to let any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for - well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat - I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell - everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it.

81. Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.

88. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, 'All right, then, I'll GO to hell.'

91. The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done - turn back and get at something profitable - no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.

103. It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.

104. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.

112. Biographies are but clothes and buttons of the man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written.

113. Of all the creatures that were made he [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one - the solitary one - that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices - the most hateful...He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain...Also - in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.

119. Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.

140. I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.

161. A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

168. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.

171. I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

174. It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

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

179. Love your enemy, it'll scare the hell out of him.

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

183. Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.

185. I admire the serene assurance of those who have religious faith. It is wonderful to observe the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.

188. There ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

191. Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.

192. They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!

194. When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.

196. You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

198. When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.