Mark Twain

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 – April 21, 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American humorist, novelist, writer, and lecturer.

Contents 1 Sourced 1.1 The Innocents Abroad (1869) 1.2 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) 1.3 New England Weather, speech to the New England Society (December 22, 1876) 1.4 Life on the Mississippi (1883) 1.5 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) 1.6 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) 1.7 Pudd'n'head Wilson (1894) 1.8 How To Tell A Story (1895) 1.9 Following the Equator (1897) 1.10 Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899) 1.11 What Is Man? (1906) 1.12 Letters From the Earth (written 1909, published 1962) 1.13 The Mysterious Stranger (1916) 1.14 Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924) 1.15 Mark Twain's Notebook (1935) 1.15.1 Papers of the Adams Family 2 Attributed 2.1 Life 2.2 India 2.3 Writing and speaking 2.4 Money and finance 2.5 Education 2.6 Facts 2.7 Government and politics 2.8 Health 2.9 History 2.10 Humour 2.11 Kipling 2.12 Truth 2.13 War 2.14 Weather 2.15 Miscellaneous 3 Misattributions 4 External links

Sourced

• I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.
  • The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1865)

• I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.
  • The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

• Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
  • The Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation (1867)

• Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience—4000 critics.
  • Letter to Pamela Clemens Moffet (November 9, 1869)

• Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
  • A Mysterious Visit (1875)

• This poor little one-horse town.
  • The Undertaker's Chat (1875)

• A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.
  • Letter to Annie Webster (September 1, 1876)

• We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.
  • Answering a toast, "To the babies," at a banquet in honor of General U.S. Grant (November 14, 1879)

• Among the three or four million cradles now rocking in the land are some which this nation would preserve for ages as sacred things, if we could know which ones they are.
  • Answering a toast, "To the babies," at a banquet in honor of General U.S. Grant

• An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite picturesque liar.
  • The Private History of a Campaign That Failed (1885)

• He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty.
  • Henry Ward Beecher's Farm (1885)

• He [George Washington Cable] has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.
  • Letter to William Dean Howells (February 27, 1885)

• The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter- it's the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.
  • Letter to George Bainton (1888)

• Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it.
  • The American Claimant, forward (1892)

• Warm summer sun, shine kindly here;
  Warm southern wind, blow softly here;
  Green sod above, lie light, lie light—
  Good-night, dear heart, good-night, good-night.
  • Epitaph for his daughter, Olivia Susan Clemens (1896)

• The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.
  • Cable from London to the Associated Press (1897)

• A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.
  • More Tramps Abroad (1897)

• In Boston they ask, How much does he know? In New York, How much is he worth? In Philadelphia, Who were his parents?
  • What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us? (1899)

• Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations and resentments flit away and a sunny spirit takes their place.
  • What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us

• The rule is perfect; in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
  • Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy (1899)

• I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I’m not feeling so well myself.
  • The History of the Savage Club, speech (1899)

• The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples—that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at.
  • My First Lie, and How I Got Out of It (1900)

• ...heaven for climate, Hell for society.
  • Speech to the Acorn Society (1901)

• Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it.
  • Speech to Eastman College (1901)

• The Blessings-of-Civilization Trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. There is more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there is in any other game that is played. But Christendom has been playing it badly of late years, and must certainly suffer by it, in my opinion. She has been so eager to get every stake that appeared on the green cloth, that the People who Sit in Darkness have noticed it -- they have noticed it, and have begun to show alarm. They have become suspicious of the Blessings of Civilization.
  • To the Person Sitting in Darkness (1901)

• Always do right. This will gratify some people, and astonish the rest.
  • To the Young People's Society, Greenpoint Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn (February 16, 1901)

• The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.
  • Autobiographical Dictation (1906)

• A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
  • Essay on William Dean Howells (1906)

• Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.
  • The Gorky Incident (1906)

• Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.
  • The Gorky Incident

• Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
  • Letter to an Unidentified Person (1908)

• You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.
  • Europe and Elsewhere. Corn Pone Opinions (1925)

• Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.
  • Europe and Elsewhere. Corn Pone Opinions

• Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of a thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.
  • Letters from the Earth. The Damned Human Race (published 1962)

The Innocents Abroad (1869)

• I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up.
  • Ch. 7

• They spell it "Vinci" and pronounce it "Vinchy." Foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.
  • Ch. 19

• I used to worship the mighty genius of Michael Angelo—that man who was great in poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture—great in every thing he undertook. But I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast—for luncheon—for dinner—for tea—for supper—for between meals. I like a change, occasionally.
  • Ch. 27

• Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo!
  • Ch. 27

• Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.
  • Ch. 27

• In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
  • Ch. 61

• Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
  • Conclusion

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)

• Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
  • Ch. 2

• He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it — namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to obtain.
  • Ch. 2

• Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and...Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
  • Ch. 2

• The minister gave out his text and droned along monotonously through an argument that was so prosy that many a head by and by began to nod—and yet it was an argument that dealt in limitless fire and brimstone and thinned the predestined elect down to a company so small as to be hardly worth the saving.
  • Ch. 5

• There was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing—and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.
  • Ch. 13

• To promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
  • Ch. 22

• She makes me get up just at the same time every morning; she makes me wash, they comb me all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed; I got to wear them blamed clothes that just smothers me, Tom; they don't seem to let any air git through 'em, somehow; and they're so rotten nice that I can't set down, nor lay down, nor roll around anywher's; I hain't slid on a cellar-door for—well, it 'pears to be years; I got to go to church and sweat and sweat—I hate them ornery sermons! I can't ketch a fly in there, I can't chaw. I got to wear shoes all Sunday. The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell—everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it.
  • Ch. 35

New England Weather, speech to the New England Society (December 22, 1876)

• There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger's admiration—and regret. The weather is always doing something there; always attending strictly to business; always getting up new designs and trying them on people to see how they will go. But it gets through more business in spring than in any other season. In the spring I have counted one hundred and thirty-six different kinds of weather inside of twenty-four hours.

• Probable nor'east to sou'west winds, varying to the soutard and westard and eastard and points between; high and low barometer, sweeping round from place to place; probable areas of rain, snow, hail, and drought, succeeded or preceded by earthquakes with thunder and lightning.

• One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.

Life on the Mississippi (1883)

• The Mississippi is well worth reading about. It is not a commonplace river, but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable. Considering the Missouri its main branch, it is the longest river in the world—four thousand three hundred miles. It seems safe to say that it is also the crookedest river in the world, since in one part of its journey it uses up one thousand three hundred miles to cover the same ground that the crow would fly over in six hundred and seventy-five.
  • Ch. 1

• The world and the books are so accustomed to use, and over-use, the word 'new' in connection with our country, that we early get and permanently retain the impression that there is nothing old about it.
  • Ch. 1

• Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake.
  • Ch. 3

• When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales! I scratch my head with the lightning, and purr myself to sleep with the thunder!
  • Ch. 3

• Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
  • Ch. 4

• I was gratified to be able to answer promptly and I did. I said I didn't know.
  • Ch. 6

• Your true pilot cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.
  • Ch. 7

• By the Shadow of Death, but he's a lightning pilot!
  • Ch. 7

• Here is a proud devil, thought I; here is a limb of Satan that would rather send us all to destruction than put himself under obligations to me, because I am not yet one of the salt of the earth and privileged to snub captains and lord it over everything dead and alive in a steamboat.
  • Ch. 8

• I felt like a skinful of dry bones and all of them trying to ache at once.
  • Ch. 8

• You can depend on it, I'll learn him or kill him.
  • Ch. 8

• The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book — a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
  • Ch. 9

• There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
  • Ch. 17
  • Discussing the shortening of the lower Mississippi River by 242 miles in 167 years, and extrapolating this figure to a million years ago and to the 27th century.

• Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him, sir.
  • Ch. 23

• I've worked up a business here that would satisfy any man, don't care who he is. Five years ago, lodged in an attic; live in a swell house now, with a mansard roof, and all the modern inconveniences.
  • Ch. 43

• I found the half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they had formerly been. A Southerner talks music. At least it is music to me, but then I was born in the South. The educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word.
  • Ch. 44

• In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it.
  • Ch. 45

• War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.
  • Ch. 45

• Sir Walter [Scott] had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.
  • Ch. 46

• The letter was a pure swindle, and that is the truth. And take it by and large, it was without a compeer among swindles. It was perfect, it was rounded, symmetrical, complete, colossal!
  • Ch. 52

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

• Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
  BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.
  • Notice

• You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
  • Ch. 1

• Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.
  • Ch. 2

• We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed—only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all—that night, nor the next, nor the next.
  • Ch. 12

• Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
  • Ch. 17

• There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.
  • Ch. 18

• We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
  • Ch. 18

• To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin.
  • Ch. 21

• H'aint we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town?
  • Ch. 26

• I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, "All right, then, I'll GO to hell."
  • Ch. 31

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)

• My kind of loyalty was loyalty to one's country, not to its institutions or its officeholders. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the eternal thing; it is the thing to watch over, and care for, and be loyal to; institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, and death.
  • Ch. 13

• The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done—turn back and get at something profitable—no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.
  • Ch. 22

• Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
  • Ch. 22

• Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
  • Ch. 22

Pudd'n'head Wilson (1894)

• Tell the truth or trump—but get the trick.
  • Ch. 1

• Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.
  • Ch. 2

• Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
  • Ch. 3

• Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
  • Ch. 5

• Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
  • Ch. 6

• Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs at step at a time.
  • Ch. 6

• One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
  • Ch. 7

• The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.
  • Ch. 8

• Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June bug than an old bird of paradise.
  • Ch. 8

• Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
  • Ch. 9

• All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"—a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
  • Ch. 10

• When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
  • Ch. 10

• There are three infallible ways of pleasing an author, and the three form a rising scale of compliment: 1—to tell him you have read one of his books; 2—to tell him you have read all of his books; 3—to ask him to let you read the manuscript of his forthcoming book. No. 1 admits you to his respect; No. 2 admits you to his admiration; No. 3 carries you clear into his heart.
  • Ch. 11

• As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
  • Ch. 11

• Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
  • Ch. 12

• When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.
  • Ch. 13

• October. This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks in. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August, and February.
  • Ch. 13

• Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.
  • Ch. 15

• Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a manner of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Put all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET."
  • Ch. 15

• 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.
  • Ch. 16

• Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by.
  • Ch. 18

• Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
  • Ch. 19

• It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
  • Ch. 19

How To Tell A Story (1895)

• The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

• To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

Following the Equator (1897)

• Be good and you will be lonesome.
  • Caption for the author's photograph on shipboard

• A man may have no bad habits and have worse.
  • Ch. 1

• When in doubt tell the truth.
  • Ch. 2

• It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.
  • Ch. 3

• Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
  • Ch. 5

• The truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
  • Ch. 7

• It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
  • Ch. 8

• Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
  • Ch. 10

• We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.
  • Ch. 11

• There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
  • Ch. 12

• The timid man yearns for full value and asks a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par.
  • Ch. 13

• We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.
  • Ch. 14

• Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't.
  • Ch. 15

• There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.
  • Ch. 16

• It is easier to stay out than to get out.
  • Ch. 18

• Pity is for the living, Envy is for the dead.
  • Ch. 19

• It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
  • Ch. 20

• Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied.
  • Ch. 21

• There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
  • Ch. 21

• Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
  • Ch. 23

• "Classic." A book which people praise and don't read.
  • Ch. 25

• There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one! keep from telling their happinesses to the unhappy.
  • Ch. 26

• Man is the only animal that blushes, or needs to.
  • Ch. 27

• Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed.
  • Ch. 28

• When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself.
  • Ch. 29

• The tattooing in these portraits [in Dr Hocken's collection] ought to suggest the savage, of course, but it does not. The designs are so flowing and graceful and beautiful that they are a most satisfactory decoration. It takes but fifteen minutes to get reconciled to the tattooing and but fifteen more to perceive that it is just the thing. After that, the undecorated European face is unpleasant and ignorable.
  • Ch. 30

• The man with a new idea is a Crank until the idea succeeds.
  • Ch. 32

• Let us be grateful to Adam our benefactor. He cut us out of the "blessing of idleness," and won for us the "curse of labor."
  • Ch. 33

• Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all.
  • Ch. 34

• There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice.
  • Ch. 36

• To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do.
  • Ch. 37

• Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
  • Ch. 38

• By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
  • Ch. 39

• Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean.
  • Ch. 40

• Each person is born to one possession which outvalues all his others--his last breath.
  • Ch. 42

• Hunger is the handmaid of genius.
  • Ch. 43

• It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart; the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you.
  • Ch. 45

• If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
  • Ch. 46

• Grief can take care of itself; but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
  • Ch. 48

• Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.
  • Ch. 52

• I believe that in India "cold weather" is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.
  • Ch. 54

• There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can.
  • Ch. 56

• Make it a point to do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
  • Ch. 58

• Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
  • Ch. 59

• Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
  • Ch. 59

• First God created idiots, this was for practice. Then He made School Boards.
  • Ch. 61

• Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows anybody.
  • Ch. 66

Concerning the Jews (Harper's Magazine, Sept. 1899)

• I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

• The Jew is not a disturber of the peace of any country. Even his enemies will concede that. He is not a loafer, he is not a sot, he is not noisy, he is not a brawler nor a rioter, he is not quarrelsome. In the statistics of crime his presence is conspicuously rare — in all countries. With murder and other crimes of violence he has but little to do: he is a stranger to the hangman. In the police court's daily long roll of "assaults" and "drunk and disorderlies" his name seldom appears ...

• A Jewish beggar is not impossible, perhaps; such a thing may exist, but there are few men that can say they have seen that spectacle.

• These facts are all on the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is a good and orderly citizen. Summed up, they certify that he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crimes and brutal dispositions; that his family life is commendable; that he is not a burden upon public charities; that he is not a beggar; that in benevolence he is above the reach of competition. These are the very quint-essentials of good citizenship.

• If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?

What Is Man? (1906)

• It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.
  • Ch. 6

• 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.
  • Ch. 6

• Man is the only animal that deals in that atrocity of atrocities, War. He is the only one that gathers his brethren about him and goes forth in cold blood and calm pulse to exterminate his kind. He is the only animal that for sordid wages will march out...and help to slaughter strangers of his own species who have done him no harm and with whom he has no quarrel...and in the intervals between campaigns he washes the blood off his hands and works for "the universal brotherhood of man" — with his mouth.

Letters From the Earth (written 1909, published 1962)

Edited by Bernard Augustine De Voto|, composed from Twain's notes written prior to 1910

• It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
  • About the Christian Bible, Letter III

• Life was not a valuable gift, but death was. Life was a fever-dream made up of joys embittered by sorrows, pleasure poisoned by pain, a dream that was a nightmare-confusion of spasmodic and fleeting delights, ecstasies, exultations, happinesses, interspersed with long-drawn miseries, griefs, perils, horrors, disappointments, defeats, humiliations, and despairs — the heaviest curse devisable by divine ingenuity; but death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
  • Letter X, 1909

• The official list of questions which the priest is required to ask will overmasteringly excite any woman who is not a paralytic.
  • Letter XI

The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

• Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

• Only laughter can blow [a colossal humbug] to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)

• Biographies are but clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
  • Vol. I, p. 2

• Of all the creatures that were made he [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one—the solitary one—that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices—the most hateful...He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain...Also—in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.
  • Vol. II, p. 7

• The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades.
  • Vol. II, p. 69

Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

• France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country.

• God's inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn.

• France has usually been governed by prostitutes.

• The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.

• Familiarity breeds contempt — and children.

• Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

• Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all—the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.
  • Memorandum written on his deathbed

Papers of the Adams Family

• Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object — robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. Today they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician's trick — a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every schoolhouse in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor — none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation?
  For in a republic, who is "the Country"? Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant — merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who isn't. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is "the country?" Is it the newspaper? Is it the pulpit? Is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who isn’t.

• In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catch-phrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country — hold up your head! You have nothing to be ashamed of.
  Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time.
  This Republic's life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands.

Attributed

Life

• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

India

• Land of religions, cradle of human race, birthplace of human speech, grandmother of legend, great grandmother of tradition. The land that all men desire to see and having seen once even by a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of the rest of the globe combined.

• India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soul.

• Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India.

Writing and speaking

• Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing.
  • This quote, in both this and a slightly different form, is also attributed to Robert Benchley.

• I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

• The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.

• Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting over.

• I'm sorry this letter is so long, but I did not have time to make it shorter.
  • the original quote is by Blaise Pascal

Money and finance

• A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain.

• I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position.

Education

• A classic is something that everybody praises and nobody has read.

• Cauliflower is nothing but Cabbage with a College Education.

• Never let your schoolin' interfere with your education.

Facts

• Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
  • Commonly quoted as: "First get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure."

Government and politics

• The citizen who sees his society's democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry out is not a patriot but a traitor.

• In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.

• In the beginning of a change, the patriot is a scarce man; brave, hated, and scorned. When his cause succeeds, however, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot.

• It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make as good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.

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

• Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it.

• Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.

• Whenever you find that you are on the side of the majority, it is time to reform.

• All you have to fear is your mother's cooking.

• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect.

Health

• Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

• There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it. How strange it is. It is like paying out your whole fortune for a cow that has gone dry.

History

• The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
  • Also quoted as "History does not repeat itself, It rhymes."
  • Notes on sourcing

Humour

• Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humour itself is not joy but sorrow.

• The funniest things are the forbidden.

• Humour must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes.

• Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.

Kipling

• He is a stranger to me, but he is a most remarkable man--and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.
  • in Eruption

Truth

• A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on. (This has also been attributed to Winston Churchill.)

• Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.

War

• It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.

• The loud little handful will shout for war. The pulpit will warily and cautiously protest at first…The great mass of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes, and will try to make out why there should be a war, and they will say earnestly and indignantly: "It is unjust and dishonorable and there is no need for war." Then the few will shout even louder…Before long you will see a curious thing: anti-war speakers will be stoned from the platform, and free speech will be strangled by hordes of furious men who still agree with the speakers but dare not admit it ... Next, statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.

Weather

• Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.
  • notes on sourcing

• If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes.

Miscellaneous

• A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.

• All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.

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

• Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.

• Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

• Denial ain't just a river in Egypt.

• Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

• The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.

• Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one.

• France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.

• I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying that I approved of it.

• I have found solace in profanity unexcelled even by prayer.

• I have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

• It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

• I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly

• It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.

• It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog.

• I've never killed a man, but I've read many an obituary with a great deal of satisfaction. (also attributed to Clarence Darrow)

• 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.

• Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear, and the blind can read.

• The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.

• Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow.

• None but the dead have free speech.

• Only presidents, editors and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we".

• Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it.

• Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

• The calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.

• The catfish is a plenty good enough fish for anyone.

• The difference between men and women, as regards to sex, is like the relationship between the candlestick and the candleholder — the candleholder is always there. (This quoted from memory, wording may not be perfect)

• The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

• The only time I ate potato salad, was the year I got shot.

• There ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.

• There are no dialogues, only intersecting monologues.

• There is nothing lower than the human race except the French.

• They did not know it was impossible, so they did it!

• The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.

• Wagner's music is better than it sounds.

• When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
  • Alternate version: When I was sixteen, my father was the most ignorant man in the world. By the time I reached 21, I was surprised at how much he had learned in five years.

Misattributions

• For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
  • Actual Source: A letter to The Economist, written by one M.J. Shields (or M.J. Yilz, by the end of the letter). The letter is quoted in full in one of Willard Espy's Words at Play books

• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
  • I've never seen that quote attributed to Twain by anyone who could be considered an authority on him — Jim Zwick
  • This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but the attribution cannot be verified. The quote should not be regarded as authentic. — Twainquotes

• The minority is always in the right. The majority is always in the wrong.
  • Attributed to Twain, but never sourced. Suspiciously close to "A minority may be right, and the majority is always in the wrong." — Henrik Ibsen "Enemy of the People," as well as a famous quote from Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard

• Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
  • Often attributed to Twain online, but unsourced. Alternate source: "The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak." — Robert Heinlein "The Man Who Sold the Moon" p.188. Feel free to move this back up if you can source it.

• There are three kinds of lies — Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
  • Often attributed to Twain, but in his use of the phrase he stated he was quoting Benjamin Disraeli, and this itself is probably a misattribution as the earliest known use of it was actually by Leonard H. Courtney. Twain did, however, popularise this saying in the United States. The attribution arises from the following passage in Twain's Autobiography (1924), Vol. I, p. 246 (apparently written in Florence in 1904) [1]:
    • I was deducing from the above that I have been slowing down steadily in these thirty-six years, but I perceive that my statistics have a defect: 3,000 words in the spring of 1868, when I was working seven or eight or nine hours at a sitting, has little or no advantage over the sitting of to-day, covering half the time and producing half the output. Figures often beguile me, particularly when I have the arranging of them myself; in which case the remark attributed to Disraeli would often apply with justice and force: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

• It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
  • Cited as an example of "What Mark Twain Didn't Say" in Mark Twain by Geoffrey C. Ward, et. al.

• The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
  • Often attributed to Twain, but of unknown origin. [1], [2]

External links

• Works by Mark Twain at Project Gutenberg
• The Works of Mark Twain
• http://www.twainquotes.com
• Comprehensive collection of Mark Twain Quotes

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