Mark Twain Quotes About Soul

• Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.

  Mark Twain

  Change, Loyalty, Courage

  Speech, Hartford, Conn., 1884

• Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.

  Mark Twain

  Neat And Tidy, Soul, Dresses

  "The Jumping Frog: And 18 Other Stories".

• The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.

  Mark Twain

  Heart, Eye, Judging

  Mark Twain (2016). “Joan of Arc”, p.117, Ignatius Press

• The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice -- and always has been.

  Mark Twain

  Soul, Patriotism, Substance

  Mark Twain, Caroline Thomas Harnsberger (2009). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.350, Courier Corporation

• To us, our house was not unsentient matter -- it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction.

  Mark Twain

  Heart, Eye, House

  Mark Twain (2004). “The Letters of Mark Twain”, p.251, 1st World Publishing

• Geniuses are people who dash off weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates a man to ineffable speres [sic] far above the vulgar world, & fills his soul with a regal contempt for the gross & sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.

  Mark Twain

  Sleep, Men, People

• I bring you this stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored from pirate raids in Kiao-Chow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Phillipines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass.

  Mark Twain

  Glasses, Hypocrisy, Giving

  R. Kent Rasmussen, Mark Twain (2013). “Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers”, p.178, Univ of California Press

• An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving.

  Mark Twain

  Truth, Lying, Men

  Mark Twain, General Press (2016). “The Complete Works of Mark Twain: All 13 Novels, Short Stories, Poetry and Essays”, p.2132, GENERAL PRESS

• I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument an an unsuspected yearning to play on it, which are bound to wake up an demand attention someday. Therefore you who rail at such that disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a guitar, beware! For sooner or later your own time will come.

  Mark Twain

  Music, Lying, Men

• There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist. ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had.

  Mark Twain

  Reading, People, Soul

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.333, Courier Corporation

• The true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tongue by, and to keep the blood and the brain stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.

  Mark Twain

  Lying, Eye, Men

  Mark Twain (2016). “A Tramp Abroad”, p.139, Xist Publishing

• The smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.

  Mark Twain

  Heart, Soul, Mind

  Mark Twain (2004). “The Portable Mark Twain”, p.572, Penguin

• The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable.

  Mark Twain

  Soul, Unendurable, Mediocre

  Mark Twain (1976). “Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume II: (1877-1883)”, p.142, Univ of California Press

• One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat.

  Mark Twain

  Soul, Religion, World

  Mark Twain (2012). “Mark Twain at Your Fingertips: A Book of Quotations”, p.198, Courier Corporation

• Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men.

  Mark Twain

  Kings, Men, Soul

  Mark Twain (2008). “10 Books in 1”, p.383, Shoes & Ships & Sealing Wax

• The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit - how it grows! what a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment, how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves with their beguiling fantasies - oh, yes, and how soon and how easily our dream-life and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together that we can't quite tell which is which, anymore.

  Mark Twain

  Dream, Luxury, Soul

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.3191, Delphi Classics

• I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be; even I cannot tell, myself.

  Mark Twain

  Hands, Soul, Portraits

  Mark Twain (1933). “Mark Twain's works”

• The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

  Mark Twain

  Pride, Hands, Ideas

  Mark Twain (2014). “Mark Twain’s Letters & Speeches (Annotated Edition)”, p.831, Jazzybee Verlag

• Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully.

  Mark Twain

  Music, Hypocrisy, Bully

  Mark Twain (1992). “Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn”, p.293, Wordsworth Editions

• Drop this mean and sordid and selfish devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up something to do that's got some dignity to it! Risk your souls! Risk them in good causes; then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform!

  Mark Twain

  Selfish, Mean, Soul

  Mark Twain (2004). “The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories”, p.108, Penguin

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