43 Best Innocents Abroad Quotes by Mark Twain

Innocents abroad quotes: The Innocents abroad is a travel fiction book written by American Author Mark Twain in the year 1869. The five-month voyage included numerous side trips on land. The book, which sometimes appears with the subtitle “The New Pilgrim’s Progress”, became the best-selling of Twain’s works during his lifetime, as well as one of the best-selling travel books of all time. Reference.

These Innocents Abroad quotes are taken from Goodreads. 

Related: 81 Mark Twain Quotes About Politics, Adventure And Life

Innocents Abroad Quotes

  1. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; ― Mark Twain.
  2. We ordered him peremptorily to sit down with us. ― Mark Twain.
  3. Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world. ― Mark Twain.
  4. A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once—not oftener. ― Mark Twain.
  5. It surprises me sometimes to think how much we know and how intelligent we are. ― Mark Twain.
  6. She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die. ― Mark Twain.
  7. Why would people be so stupid as to assume themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten thousand persons? ― Mark Twain.
  8. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. ― Mark Twain.
  9. The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug ― Mark Twain.

Mark Twain Innocents Abroad Quotes

  1. Inaugurated. Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. ― Mark Twain.
  2. Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds. ― Mark Twain.
  3. Broad, wholesome, charitable view of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime. ― Mark Twain.
  4. Though old as history itself, thou art fresh as the breath of spring, blooming as thine own orange flower, O Damascus, the pearl of the East!. ― Mark Twain.
  5. One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning. ― Mark Twain.
  6. In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never succeeded in making those idiots understand their own language. ― Mark Twain.
  7. I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead. ― Mark Twain.
  8. The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information that the ancients didn’t have was very voluminous. ― Mark Twain.
  9. Dan said the other day to the guide, “Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo! ― Mark Twain.

Mark Twain Fishing Quotes

  1. The Vesuvius of today is a very poor affair compared to the mighty volcano of Kilauea, in the Sandwich Islands, but I am glad I visited it. It was well worth it. ― Mark Twain.
  2. If there is one thing in the world that will make a man peculiarly and insufferably self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day it seas, when nearly all his comrades are seasick. ― Mark Twain.
  3. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It. ― Mark Twain.
  4. If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to me rattain in hees serveece, I shall show to him every sing zat is magnifique to look upon in ze beautiful Parree. I speaky ze Angleesh pairfaitemaw. ― Mark Twain.
  5. Notwithstanding all this furniture, there was still room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat in, at least with entire security to the cat. However, the room was large, for a ship’s stateroom, and was in every way satisfactory. ― Mark Twain.
  6. The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history. ― Mark Twain.
  7. We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can “show off” and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can’t shake off. ― Mark Twain.
  8. The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become until he goes abroad. I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the gentle reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass. If the case be otherwise, I beg his pardon and extend to him the cordial hand of fellowship and call him brother. I shall always delight to meet an ass after my own heart when I have finished my travels. ― Mark Twain
  9. Just try that mixture once, Captain Duncan.” He smelt it—tasted it—smiled benignantly—then said: “It is inferior—for coffee—but it is pretty fair tea. – The humbled mutineer smelt it, tasted it, and returned to his seat. He had made an egregious ass of himself before the whole ship. He did it no more. After that he took things as they came. That was me. ― Mark Twain.

Abroad Quotes

28. As far as I can see, Italy, for fifteen hundred years, has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry into the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving half her citizens to accomplish it. She is today one vast museum of magnificence and misery. All the churches in an ordinary American city put together could hardly buy the jeweled frippery in one of her hundred cathedrals. And for every beggar in America, Italy can show a hundred – and rags and vermin to match. It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth.

Look at the grande Doumo of Florence – a vast pile that has been sapping the purses of her citizens for five hundred years, and is not nearly finished yet. Like all other men

I fell down and worshiped it, but when the filthy beggars swarmed around me the contrast was too striking, too suggestive, and I said. “Oh, sons of classic Italy, is the spirit of enterprise, of self-reliance, of noble endeavors, utterly dead within ye? Curse your indolent worthlessness, why don’t you rob your church?― Mark Twain. 

29. School boy days are no happier than the days of after life, but we look back upon them regretfully because we have forgotten our punishments at school and how we grieved when our marbles were lost and our kites destroyed – because we have forgotten all the sorrows and privations of the canonized ethic and remember only its orchard robberies, its wooden-sword pageants, and its fishing holidays. ― Mark Twain. 

30. Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We don’t mind it so much in Salt Lake, however. ― Mark Twain. 

31. We shall remember …… Damascus, the “Pearl of the East”, the pride of Syria, the fabled garden of Eden, the home of princes and genii of the Arabian Nights,the oldest metropolis on Earth, the one city in all the world that has kept its name and held its place and looked serenely on while the Kingdoms and Empires of four thousand years have risen to life, enjoyed their little season of pride and pomp, and then vanished and been forgotten ― Mark Twain

32. Damascus is simply an oasis, and that is what it is. For four thousand years its waters have not gone dry or its fertility failed. Now we can understand why the city has existed for so long. It could not die. So long as its waters remain to it away out there in the midst of that howling desert, so long will Damascus live to bless the sight of the tired and thirsty wayfarer.

But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate, drivel and lie. You can tell them the moment we see them. They always throw out a few feelers; they never cast themselves adrift till they have sounded every individual and know that he has not traveled. Then they open their throttle valves, and how they brag, and sneer, and swell, and soar, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea, their grand aim, is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory! They will not let you know anything.

They sneer at your most inoffensive suggestions; they laugh unfeelingly at your treasured dreams of foreign lands; they brand the statements of your traveled aunts and uncles as the stupidest absurdities; they deride your most trusted authors and demolish the fair images they have set up for your willing worship with the pitiless ferocity of the fanatic iconoclast!

But still I love the Old Travelers. I love them for their witless platitudes, for their supernatural ability to bore, for their delightful asinine vanity, for their luxuriant fertility of imagination, for their startling, their brilliant, their overwhelming mendacity! ― Mark Twain. 

33. We do not get ice-cream everywhere, and so, when we do, we are apt to dissipate to excess. We never cared anything about ice-cream at home, but we look upon it with a sort of idolatry now that it is so scarce in these red-hot climates of the East. ― Mark Twain. 

34. We saw rude piles of stones standing near the roadside, at intervals, and recognized the custom of marking boundaries which obtained in Jacob’s time. There were no walls, no fences, no hedges—nothing to secure a man’s possessions but these random heaps of stones.

The Israelites held them sacred in the old patriarchal times, and these other Arabs, their lineal descendants, do so likewise. An American of ordinary intelligence would soon widen his property in an outlay of mere manual labor performed at night under such loose a system of fencing as this. ― Mark Twain. 

35. Playing whist by the cabin lamps when it is storming outside is pleasant; walking the quarterdeck in the moonlight is pleasant; smoking in the breezy foretop is pleasant when one is not afraid to go up there; but these are all feeble and commonplace compared with the joy of seeing people suffering the miseries of seasickness. ― Mark Twain. 

36. We consulted the guide-books and were rejoiced to know that there were no sights in Odessa to see; and so we had one good, untrammeled holiday on our hands, with nothing to do but idle about the city and enjoy ourselves. ― Mark Twain.

37. There they are, down there every night at eight bells, praying for fair winds—when they know as well as I do that this is the only ship going east this time of the year, but there’s a thousand coming west—what’s a fair wind for us is a head wind to them—the Almighty’s blowing a fair wind for a thousand vessels, and this tribe wants him to turn it clear around so as to accommodate one—and she a steamship at that! It ain’t good sense, it ain’t good reason, it ain’t good Christianity, it ain’t common human charity. Avast with such nonsense! ― Mark Twain

38. On the island at our right was the machine they call the Nilometer, a stone-column whose business it is to mark the rise of the river and prophecy whether it will reach only thirty-two feet and produce a famine, or whether it will properly flood the land at forty and produce plenty, or whether it will rise to forty-three and bring death and destruction to flocks and crops—but how it does all this they could not explain to us so that we could understand. ― Mark Twain

39. I am reminded, now, of one of these complaints of the cookery made by a passenger. The coffee had been steadily growing more and more execrable for the space of three weeks, till at last it had ceased to be coffee altogether and had assumed the nature of mere discolored waterso this person said. He said it was so weak that it was transparent an inch in depth around the edge of the cup. As he approached the table one morning he saw the transparent edge—by means of his extraordinary vision long before he got to his seat.

Mark Twain Adventure Quotes

He went back and complained in a high-handed way to Capt. Duncan. He said the coffee was disgraceful. The Captain showed him. It seemed tolerably good. The incipient mutineer was more outraged than ever, then, at what he denounced as the partiality shown the captain’s table over the other tables in the ship. He flourished back and got his cup and set it down triumphantly, and said:

I have caught a glimpse of the faces of several Moorish women (for they are only human, and will expose their faces for the admiration of a Christian dog when no male Moor is by), and I am full of veneration for the wisdom that leads them to cover up such atrocious ugliness. ― Mark Twain. “The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It. ― Mark Twain. 

40. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It. ― Mark Twain. 

41. The executive officer said the pilgrims had no charity: ” There they are, down there every night at eight bells, praying for fair winds – when they know as well as I do that this is the only ship goşng east this time of the year, but there’s a thousand coming west – what’s a fair wind for us is a head wind to them – the Almighty’s blowing a fair wind for a thousand of vessels, and this tribe wants him turn it clear around so as to accommodate one and she a steamship at that! It ain’t good sense, it ain’t good reason, it ain’t good Christianity, it ain’t common human charity. Avast with such nonsense! ― Mark Twain. 

42. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It. ― Mark Twain. 

43. The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It. ― Mark Twain.