Mark Twain Quotes

The world's as ugly as sin, and almost as delightful.

Man is a paradoxical being - the constant glory and scandal of this world.

Men are not angels, neither are they brutes.

Man is neither angel nor beast.

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

Nobody's all good or bad, and nobody's all light or dark. Every human being has so many different aspects and facets to them. And there can be something noble and something really dark and dangerous going on in a person all at the same time.

I've always been drawn to tormented people full of contradictions.

We shall never resolve the enigma of the relation between the negative foundations of greatness and that greatness itself.

I think everybody has a good and bad side.

The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one soul, and he has got dozens.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Secretly we're all a little more absurd than we make ourselves out to be.

We are not angels. Nor are we the devils you have made us out to be.

The way I look at humanity, I don't think there's good guys or bad guys. We're all potentially bad and potentially good.

The world asks us to be quickly readable, but the thing about human beings is that we are more than one thing. We are multiple selves. We are massively contradictory.

Mike and I are always drawn to the idea that there is light and dark inside every being, rather than the old two-dimensional trope of good versus evil.

I'm interested in people's darkness - and humor in the darkness.

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

Man is an embodied paradox, a bundle of contradictions.

Nobody's perfect. We're all just one step up from the beasts and one step down from the angels.

There's not one person in the world that's not a living, walking contradiction.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.

Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets with in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.

You humans, you know, whoever built you sewed irony into your sinews.