# The best Mark Twain quotes (that he actually wrote)

Twain is the most misquoted writer in America. These are his real lines, each with the book, notebook or interview it comes from. Not his: «Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed…» and «I have never let my schooling interfere with my education».

- 803 votes · 14 items
- Apr 15, 2021 · fanzone_boston
- https://even.best/en/l/918/the-best-mark-twain-quotes-that-he-actually-wrote

## Top 12

1. **The report of my death was an exaggeration.** (113 · ▲118 ▼5) — To a New York Journal reporter in 1897; it's usually misquoted as «greatly exaggerated».
2. **Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as you please.** (69 · ▲78 ▼9) — Quoted by Rudyard Kipling after interviewing him, in From Sea to Sea (1899).
3. **Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.** (65 · ▲77 ▼12) — Card sent to the Young People's Society of a Brooklyn church in 1901.
4. **Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.** (60 · ▲64 ▼4) — Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, in Following the Equator (1897).
5. **Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.** (42 · ▲46 ▼4) — Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).
6. **Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.** (40 · ▲45 ▼5) — Notebook entry from 1904.
7. **Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.** (38 · ▲43 ▼5) — Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, in Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).
8. **Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.** (34 · ▲39 ▼5) — Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).
9. **Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.** (27 · ▲35 ▼8) — The Innocents Abroad (1869), his book about a trip to Europe and the Holy Land.
10. **Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.** (26 · ▲45 ▼19) — Following the Equator (1897).
11. **There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.** (25 · ▲30 ▼5) — Popularized by Twain in his autobiography (1906), who credited it to Disraeli; nobody has found it in Disraeli's writings.
12. **Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.** (23 · ▲31 ▼8) — Collected in More Maxims of Mark (1927).
13. **Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time.** (18 · ▲29 ▼11) — Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894).
14. **Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.** (15 · ▲19 ▼4) — From his notebooks, published in 1935.

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.