Mark Twain Quotes About Opportunity

• Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Life, Motivational

  Mark Twain, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (2009). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.354, Courier Corporation

• I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

  Mark Twain

  Life, Opportunity, Able

  Mark Twain (2016). “Mark Twain in Eruption (Abridged, Annotated)”, p.108, BIG BYTE BOOKS

• There is no security in life, only opportunity.

  Mark Twain

  Life, Opportunity, Careers

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

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Success, Work

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.121, Courier Corporation

• Never miss an opportunity to shut up.

  Mark Twain

  Communication, Opportunity, Missing

• Our inner strengths, experiences, and truths cannot be lost, destroyed, or taken away. Every person has an inborn worth and can contribute to the human community. We all can treat one another with dignity and respect, provide opportunities to grow toward our fullest lives and help one another discover and develop our unique gifts. We each deserve this and we all can extend it to others.

  Mark Twain

  Taken, Unique, Opportunity

• Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn't something creditable created in place of it? God had His opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, He must commit this grotesque folly - a lark which must have cost Him a regret or two when He came to think it over and observe effects.

  Mark Twain

  Regret, Opportunity, Thinking

  Mark Twain (2014). “Mark Twain’s Letters & Speeches (Annotated Edition)”, p.787, Jazzybee Verlag

• Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambition.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational, Motivational, Positive

  Mark Twain, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (2009). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.354, Courier Corporation

• If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill always came together, who would escape hanging? Framed in a more positive light, this tells us also that if we wish to accomplish a particular thing then we need to increase our level of desire for that thing and to create or seek out the opportunities and right environment for it to happen without fail.

  Mark Twain

  Inspirational Life, Opportunity, Light

• As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it-it is like hitting a child.

  Mark Twain

  Appreciation, Children, Winning

  Mark Twain, Charles Neider (1987). “The outrageous Mark Twain: some lesser-known but extraordinary works : with "Reflections on religion" now in book form for the first time”, Doubleday Books

• The laws of Nature take precedence of all human laws. The purpose of all human laws is one - to defeat the laws of Nature. This is the case among all the nations, both civilized and savage. It is a grotesquerie, but when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.

  Mark Twain

  Opportunity, Race, Law

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain”, p.127, Univ of California Press

• Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.

  Mark Twain

  Funny, Respect, Truth

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.117, Courier Corporation

• The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it.

  Mark Twain

  Opportunity, Race, Grind

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.187, Courier Corporation

• If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?

  Mark Twain

  Integrity, Opportunity, Desire

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.221, Courier Corporation

• Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born -a hundred million years -and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

  Mark Twain

  Death, Grateful, Grief

  Autobiography ch. 49 (1959)

• Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life.

  Mark Twain

  Opportunity, Men, Gambling

• when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.

  Mark Twain

  Opportunity, Race, Losing

  Mark Twain (2013). “Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2: The Complete and Authoritative Edition”, p.127, Univ of California Press

• I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.

  Mark Twain

  Opportunity, Thinking, Effort

  Mark Twain (1994). “Tales, Speeches, Essays, and Sketches”, p.342, Penguin

You May Also Like:

Charles Dickens

Ernest Hemingway

Oscar Wilde

Edgar Allan Poe

Jack London

Hal Holbrook

William Faulkner