Below are 14 Mark Twain dog quotes. Twain (the pen name for Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was a very popular 19th century humorist and satirist. He was the author of several books, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He died in 1910.
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By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward — you will never get her full confidence again.
Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel; he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed — kind of a syndicate; and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that's left over.
Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.
If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much.
If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.
Pudd'nhead Wilson
It takes me a long time to lose my temper, but once lost I could not find it with a dog.
Man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to.
My father was a Saint Bernard, my mother was a Collie, but I am a Presbyterian.
Of all the creatures, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's.
Letter to W.D. Howells, 2 April 1899
There are no wild animals until man makes them so.
When a man's dog turns against him it is time for a wife to pack her trunk and go home to mama.
Mark Twain
