Sourced
Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
Source: Quoted by Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea (1899)
Authors / Mark Twain
Mark Twain quotes
1835–1910 · American humorist and novelist
Samuel Clemens wrote under the pen name Mark Twain and became America's favourite deadpan cynic. He is also, by a wide margin, the most misquoted writer in English: if a folksy joke has no owner, someone eventually signs it "Mark Twain".
6 real · 6 not theirs
Really theirs
6 quotes traced to Mark Twain's own work or a reliable witness.
Sourced
Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.
Source: Note to the Young People's Society, Greenpoint Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn (1901)
Sourced
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
Source: Pudd'nhead Wilson, ch. 12 (1894)
Sourced
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Source: Pudd'nhead Wilson, ch. 19 (1894)
Sourced
Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.
Source: Following the Equator, ch. 27 (1897)
Sourced
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Source: Following the Equator, ch. 15 (1897)
Not theirs
6 famous lines credited to Mark Twain that are misquoted, unsourced or belong to someone else.
Misquoted
The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
The real words: What he actually wrote (New York Journal, 2 June 1897): "The report of my death was an exaggeration." The punchier version is a later polish.
Not theirs
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do.
Actually: From H. Jackson Brown's book P.S. I Love You (1990), where it is credited to Brown's mother. Twain died in 1910.
Not theirs
Golf is a good walk spoiled.
Actually: Twain scholar R. Kent Rasmussen says he probably never said it; an early version ("to play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk") appears in a 1903 tennis book.
Not theirs
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
Actually: Origin unknown. Twain's real comments on San Francisco weather were mild and complimentary.
Not theirs
History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
Actually: The earliest known appearance is a 1970 poem by John Robert Colombo — sixty years after Twain's death.
Not theirs
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Actually: Blaise Pascal, Provincial Letters, Letter 16 (1657).