Mark Twain was an author and public speaker of wit and sarcasm. He has more biting comments than you have patience. I edited down an even longer list of quotes on a great Mark Twain site (which I give thanks to gathering it all originally).
ADAM
Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant.
- Notebook, 1867
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principle one was that they escaped teething.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
- Adam's Diary
ADVERSITY
By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity--another man's I mean.
- Following the Equator
ADVERTISING
Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
ADVICE
There are three things which I consider excellent advice. First, don't smoke to access. Second, don't drink to excess. Third, don't marry to excess.
- last public address, St. Timothy's School for Girls, Catonsville, MY 6/9/1909
Mark Twain's answer to a would-be writer:
"Young Author"--Yes, Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brain. So far you are correct. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat--at least not with certainty. If the specimen composition you send is about your fair usual average, I suggest that perhaps a couple of whales would be all you would want for the present. Not the largest kind, but simply good middling-sized whales.
- "Answers to Correspondents", Sketches New and Old
You should never do anything wicked and lay it on your brother, when it is just as convenient to lay it on some other boy.
- Advice for Good Little Boys
Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
- Advice to Young People speech, 4/15/1882
AFTERLIFE
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.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, 1894
AGE
Life was a fairy-tale, then, it is a tragedy now. When I was 43 and John Hay 41 he said life was a tragedy after 40, and I disputed it. Three years ago he asked me to testify again: I counted my graves, and there was nothing for me to say. I am old; I recognize it but I don't realize it. I wonder if a person ever really ceases to feel young--I mean, for a whole day at a time.
- Letter to Mr. and Mrs. William Gordon, 1/24/1906
I find no change of consequence in grown people, I do not miss the dead. It does not surprise me to hear that this friend or that friend died at such and such a time, because I fully expected that sort of news. But somehow I had made no calculation on the infants. It never occurred to me that infants grow up...These unexpected changes, from infancy to youth, and from youth to maturity, are by far the most startling things I meet with.
- Letter to San Francisco Alta California, 5/19/1867
You can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life but they would assassinate you.
- 70th birthday speech, 1905
Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been.
- Following the Equator
I was young and foolish then; now I am old an foolisher.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
AMERICA
We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.
- Foreign Critics speech, 1890
The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was.
- quoted in "Stories of Mark Twain," C. D. Williard, Pacific Outlook, 4/30/1910
ANGER
When angry count four; when very angry, swear.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
ANNIVERSARIES
What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light. Anniversaries are very well up to a certain point, while one's babies are in the process of growing up: they are joy-flags that make gay the road and prove progress; and one looks down the fluttering rank with pride. Then presently one notices that the flagstaffs are in process of a mysterious change of some sort--change of shape. Yes, they are turning into milestones. They are marking something lost now, not gained. From that time on it were best to suppress taking notice of anniversaries.
- Notebook, 1896
APRIL FOOLS DAY
This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
ARISTOCRACY
The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
ARMAMENTS
By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed.
- Notebook, 1902
ASS
Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass.
- Notebook, 1898
I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
- fragment of a letter, 1891, to unknown person
The term labrick was in constant use by all grown men except certain of the clergy in the state of Missouri when I was a boy. It had a very definite meaning & occupied in the matter of strength the middle ground between scoundrel & son of a bitch...But...let me brush aside the ornamental & give you the plain & authentic definition of the word. Labrick is substantially ass, a little enlarged & emphasized; let us say, labrick is a little stronger than ass, & not quite as strong as idiot.
- Letter to Benjamin Eli Smith, 8/6/1906
ASTRONOMY
I do not see how astronomers can help feeling exquisitely insignificant, for every new page of the Book of the Heavens they open reveals to them more and more that the world we are so proud of is to the universe of careening globes as is one mosquito to the winged and hoofed flocks and herds that darken the air and populate the plains and forests of all the earth. If you killed the mosquito would it be missed? Verily, What is Man, that he should be considered of God?
- Letter to Olivia, 1/8/1870
AUDIENCES
When an audience does not complain, it is a compliment, & when they do it is a compliment, too, if unaccompanied by violence.
- Letter to George W. Cable, Jan. 15, 1883 (reprinted in Twins of Genius by Guy Cardwell
JANE AUSTEN
To me his prose is unreadable--like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 1/18/1909
I haven't any right to criticise books, and I don't do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticise Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 9/13/1898
Lightning
I do not believe that there are to many fools. Rather there is an incongruity in the distribution in lightning strikes.
CAIN
...it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea.
- Letter to Elisha Bliss, 5/15/1871
CATS
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson
A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.
- Notebook, 1895
Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the last. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
- Notebook, 1894
CENSORSHIP
There's nobody for me to attack in this matter even with soft and gentle ridicule--and I shouldn't ever think of using a grown up weapon in this kind of a nursery. Above all, I couldn't venture to attack the clergymen whom you mention, for I have their habits and live in the same glass house which they are occupying. I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.
- Letter to Denver Post dated Aug. 14, 1902; also published in NY Tribune Aug. 22, 1902 (regarding banning of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Denver Library.)
But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.
- Letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, 2/7/1907
CHANGE
I am now about to bid farewell to San Francisco for a season, and to go back to that common home we all tenderly remember in our waking hours and fondly revisit in dreams of the night--a home which is familiar to my recollection, but will be an unknown land to my unaccustomed eyes. I shall share the fate of many another longing exile who wanders back to his early home to find gray hairs where he expected youth, graves where he looked for firesides, grief where he had pictured joy--everywhere change! remorseless change where he had heedlessly dreamed that desolating Time had stood still!--to find his cherished anticipations a mockery, and to drink the lees of disappointment instead of the beaded wine of a hope that is crowned with its fruition!
- San Francisco Alta California, 12/15/1866
CHASTITY
Chastity--you can carry it too far.
- Mark Twain in Eruption; also found in Simplified Alphabet speech
CHILDREN
The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
CHRISTIANITY
For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again--which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 1/25/1900
I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiao-Chou, 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 towel, but hide the looking glass.
- "A Salutation from the 19th to the 20th Century," 12/31/1900
CHURCH
The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.
- A Tramp Abroad
CINCINNATI
"When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times."
- This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but until the attribution can be verified, the quote should not be regarded as authentic.
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
- Life on the Mississippi
CITIZENSHIP
Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it.
- Speech 3/4/1906
In the South the war is what AD is elsewhere; they date from it.
- Life on the Mississippi
CIVILIZATION
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.
- The Innocents Abroad
Would it not be prudent to get our civilization tools together, and see how much stock is left on hand in the way of Glass Beads and Theology, and Maxim Guns and Hymn Books, and Trade Gin and Torches of Progress and Enlightenment (patent adjustable ones, good to fire villages with, upon occasion), and balance the books, and arrive at the profit and loss, so that we may intelligently decide whether to continue the business or sellout the property and start a new Civilization Scheme on the proceeds.
- "To the Person Sitting in Darkness"
Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization--one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?
- "To the Person Sitting in Darkness"
There is no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level.
- "To the Person sitting in Darkness"
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he less savage than the other savages.
- Following the Equator
Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.
- quoted in I Remember by Opie Read, 1930
ORION CLEMENS
He was always truthful; he was always sincere; he was always honest and honorable. But in light matters-matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things--he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
CLOCK
For years my pet aversion had been the cuckoo clock...Some sounds are hatefuller than others, but no sound is quite so inane, and silly, and aggravating as the "hoo'hoo" of a cuckoo clock, I think. I bought one, and am carrying it home to a certain person; for I have always said that if the opportunity ever happened, I would do that man an ill turn.
- A Tramp Abroad
CLOTHES
Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.
- quoted in More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
A policeman in plain clothes is a man; in his uniform he is ten. Clothes and title are the most potent thing, the most formidable influence, in the earth. They move the human race to willing and spontaneous respect for the judge, the general, the admiral, the bishop, the ambassador, the frivolous earl, the idiot duke, the sultan, the king, the emperor. No great title is efficient without clothes to support it.
- "The Czar's Soliloquy"
Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
COINS (motto)
Some years ago on the gold coins we used to trust in God. It think it was in 1863 that some genious suggested that it be put on the gold and silver coins which circulated among the rich. They didn't put it on the nickels and coppers because they didn't think the poor folks had any trust in God....If I remember rightly, the President required or ordered the removal of that sentence from the coins. Well, I didn't see that the statement ought to remain there. It wasn't true. But I think it would better read, "Within certain judicious limitations we trust in God," and if there isn't enough room on the coin for this, why enlarge the coin.
- Speech, 5/14/1908
COLD WEATHER
Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death.
- quoted in Mark Twain and I, Opie Read
The captain had been telling how, in one of his Arctic voyages, it was so cold that the mate's shadow froze fast to the deck and had to be ripped loose by main strength. And even then he got only about two-thirds of it back.
- Following the Equator
COMMANDMENTS
Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience; multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal.
- Notebook, May 1892 - Jan. 1893
COMMUNIST
Communism is idiocy. They want to divide up the property. Suppose they did it -- it requires brains to keep money as well as make it. In a precious little while the money would be back in the former owner's hands and the communist would be poor again.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
COMPENSATION
...it was the great law of compensation--the great law that regulates Nature's heedless agents, and sees that when they make a mistake, they shall at the self-same moment prevent that mistake from working evil consequences. Behold, the same gust of wind that blows a lady's dress aside, and exposes her ankle, fills your eyes so full of sand that you can't see it. Marvellous are the works of Nature!
- "Concerning the Conundrum
COMPLEXIONS
Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare....Where dark complexions are massed, they make the whites look bleached-out, unwholesome, and sometimes frankly ghastly. I could notice this as a boy, down South in the slavery days before the war. The splendid black satin skin of the South African Zulus of Durban seemed to me to come very close to perfection....
The white man's complexion makes no concealments. It can't. It seemed to have been designed as a catch-all for everything that can damage it. Ladies have to paint it, and powder it, and cosmetic it, and diet it with arsenic, and enamel it, and be always enticing it, and persuading it, and pestering it, and fussing at it, to make it beautiful; and they do not succeed. But these efforts show what they think of the natural complexion, as distributed. As distributed it needs these helps. The complexion which they try to counterfeit is one which nature restricts to the few--to the very few. To ninety-nine persons she gives a bad complexion, to the hundredth a good one. The hundredth can keep it--how long? Ten years, perhaps.
The advantage is with the Zulu, I think. He starts with a beautiful complexion, and it will last him through. And as for the Indian brown--firm, smooth, blemishless, pleasant, and restful to the eye, afraid of no color, harmonizing with all colors and adding a grace to them all--I think there is no sort of chance for the average white complexion against that rich and perfect tint.
- Following the Equator
COMPLIMENT
We are unanimous in the pride we take in good and genuine compliments paid us, in distinctions conferred upon us, in attentions shown us. There is not one of us, from the emperor down, but is made like that. Do I mean attentions shown us by the great? No, I mean simply flattering attentions, let them come whence they may. We despise no source that can pay us a pleasing attention--there is no source that is humble enough for that.
- "Does the Race of Man Love a Lord?"
An occasional compliment is necessary to keep up one's self-respect. The plan of the newspaper is good and wise; when you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one.
- Notebook, 1894
I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel that they have not said enough.
- Speech, 9/23/1907
I like compliments, praises, flatteries; I cordially enjoy all such things, and am grieved and disappointed when what I call a 'barren mail' arrives--a mail that hasn't any compliments in it.
- Dictation 5/19/1907
A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it.
- "Answers to Correspondents," Early Tales & Sketches, Vol. 2
The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts and the happy delivery of it another.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
Do not offer a compliment and ask a favor at the same time. A compliment that is charged for is not valuable.
- Notebook, 1902-1903
It is a talent by itself to pay compliments gracefully and have them ring true. It's an art by itself.
- "I Was Born for a Savage" speech, 1907
None but an ass pays a compliment and asks a favor at the same time. There are many asses.
- Notebook, 1902; also in More Maxims of Mark, 1927
A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
If husbands could realize what large returns of profit may be gotten out of a wife by a small word of praise paid over the counter when the market is just right, they would bring matters around the way they wish them much oftener than they usually do. Arguments are unsafe with wives, because they examine them; but they do not examine compliments. One can pass upon a wife a compliment that is three-fourths base metal; she will not even bite it to see if it is good; all she notices is the size of it, not the quality.
- "Hellfire Hotchkiss," Satires and Burlesques
The compliment that helps us on our way is not the one that is shut up in the mind, but the one that is spoken out.
- Mark Twain: A Biography
CONCEIT
If there is one thing that will make a man peculiarly and insufferable self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick.
- The Innocents Abroad
CONFIDENCE
...with the serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.
- "Washoe--Information Wanted"
There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing.
- Speech, 3/30/1901
CONFORMITY
We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).
- Notebook, 1904
Conformity-the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
- "Corn Pone Opinions"
It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval.
- "Corn Pone Opinions"
In morals, conduct, and beliefs we take the color of our environment and associations, and it is a color that can be safely warranted to wash.
- "Is Shakespeare Dead?"
Broadly speaking corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of others. Conformity is the result. Corn-pone is confor{mity}. Sometimes it has a sordid business interest back of it and is calculated: but mainly is it unconscious and not calculated.
- note on newspaper clipping of 2/18/1901; quoted in Mark Twain: God's Fool, Hamlin Hill
CONGRESS
The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.
- Mark Twain's Speeches, "The Weather"
It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
...the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.
- Letter fragment, 1891
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can.
- What Is Man?
Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues.
- Notebook, 1868
All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography; also in Mark Twain in Eruption
CONJECTURE
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
- Life on the Mississippi
CONSCIENCE
If I had the remaking of man, he wouldn't have any conscience. It is one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person; and although it certainly does a great deal of good, it cannot be said to pay, in the long run; it would be much better to have less good and more comfort. Still, this is only my opinion, and I am only one man; others, with less experience, may think differently. They have a right to their view. I only stand to this: I have noticed my conscience for many years, and I know it is more trouble and bother to me than anything else I started with. I suppose that in the beginning I prized it, because we prize anything that is ours; and yet how foolish it was to think so. If we look at it in another way, we see how absurd it is: if I had an anvil in me would I prize it? Of course not. And yet when you come to think, there is no real difference between a conscience and an anvil--I mean for comfort. I have noticed it a thousand times. And you could dissolve an anvil with acids, when you couldn't stand it any longer; but there isn't any way that you can work off a conscience--at least so it will stay worked off; not that I know of, anyway.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Our conscience takes no notice of pain inflicted on others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to us. In all cases without exception we are absolutely indifferent to another person's pain until his sufferings make us uncomfortable.
- What is Man?
CONSERVATIVE
The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
- Notebook, 1898
CONSPIRACY
The wronger a conspiracy is, the better it is.
- Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy
CONSTELLATIONS
We saw the Cross tonight, and it is not large. Not large, and not strikingly bright. But it was low down toward the horizon, and it may improve when it gets up higher in the sky. It is ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked like something else. But that description does not describe; it is too vague, too general, too indefinite. It does after a fashion suggest a cross--a cross that is out of repair--or out of drawing; not correctly shaped. It is long, with a short cross-bar, and the cross-bar is canted out of the straight line.
It consists of four large stars and one little one. The little one is out of line and further damages the shape. It should have been placed at the intersection of the stem and the cross-bar. If you do not draw an imaginary line from star to star it does not suggest a cross--nor anything in particular.
One must ignore the little star, and leave it out of the combination - it confuses everything. If you leave it out, then you can make out of the four stars a sort of cross--out of true; or a sort of kite--out of true; or a sort of coffin--out of true.
Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for. Ultimately, to satisfy the public, the fanciful name has to be discarded for a common-sense one, a manifestly descriptive one. The Great Bear remained the Great Bear--and unrecognizable as such--for thousands of years; and people complained about it all the time, and quite properly; but as soon as it became the property of the United States, Congress changed it to the Big Dipper, and now everybody is satisfied, and there is no more talk about riots. I would not change the Southern Cross to the Southern Coffin, I would change it to the Southern Kite; for up there in the general emptiness is the proper home of a kite, but not for coffins and crosses and dippers. In a little while, now--I cannot tell exactly how long it will be--the globe will belong to the English-speaking race; and of course the skies also. Then the constellations will be re-organized, and polished up, and re-named--the most of them "Victoria," I reckon, but this one will sail thereafter as the Southern Kite, or go out of business.
- Following the Equator
DACHSHUND
In the train, during a part of the return journey from Baroda, we had the company of a gentleman who had with him a remarkable looking dog. I had not seen one of its kind before, as far as I could remember; though of course I might have seen one and not noticed it, for I am not acquainted with dogs, but only with cats. This dog's coat was smooth and shiny and black, and I think it had tan trimmings around the edges of the dog, and perhaps underneath. It was a long, low dog, with very short, strange legs--legs that curved inboard, something like parentheses turned the wrong way (. Indeed, it was made on the plan of a bench for length and lowness. It seemed to be satisfied, but I thought the plan poor, and structurally weak, on account of the distance between the forward supports and those abaft. With age the dog's back was likely to sag; and it seemed to me that it would have been a stronger and more practicable dog if it had had some more legs. It had not begun to sag yet, but the shape of the legs showed that the undue weight imposed upon them was beginning to tell. It had a long nose, and floppy ears that hung down, and a resigned expression of countenance. I did not like to ask what kind of a dog it was, or how it came to be deformed, for it was plain that the gentleman was very fond of it, and naturally he could be sensitive about it. From delicacy I thought it best not to notice it too much. No doubt a man with a dog like that feels just as a person does who has a child that it out of true. The gentleman was not merely fond of the dog, he was also proud of it - just the same again, as a mother feels about her child when it is an idiot. I could see that he was proud of it, notwithstanding it was such a long dog and looked so resigned and pious. It had been all over the world with him, and had been pilgriming like that for years and years. It had traveled 50,000 miles by sea and rail, and had ridden in front of him on his horse 8,000. It had a silver medal from the Geographical Society of Great Britain for its travels, and I saw it. It had won prizes in dog shows, both in India and in England--and I saw them. He said its pedigree was on record in the Kennel Club, and it was a well-known dog. He said a great many people in London could recognize it the moment they saw it. I did not say anything, but I did not think it anything strange; I should know that dog again, myself, yet I am not careful about noticing dogs. He said that when he walked along in London, people often stopped and looked at the dog. Of course I did not say anything, for I did not want to hurt his feelings, but I could have explained to him that if you take a great long low dog like that and waddle it along the street anywhere in the world and not charge anything, people will stop and look. He was gratified because the dog took prizes. But that was nothing; if I were built like that I could take prizes myself. I wished I knew what kind of dog it was, and what is was for, but I could not very well ask, for that would show that I did not know. Not that I want a dog like that, but only to know the secret of its birth.
I think he was going to hunt elephants with it, because I know, from remarks dropped by him, that he has hunted large game in India and Africa, and likes it. But I think that if he tries to hunt elephants with it, he is going to be disappointed. I do not believe that it is suited for elephants. It lacks energy, it lacks force of character, it lacks bitterness. These things all show in the meekness and resignation of its expression. It would not attack an elephant, I am sure of it. It might not run if it saw one coming, but it looked to me like a dog that would sit down and pray.
I wish he had told me what breed it was, if there are others; but I shall know the dog next time, and then if I can bring myself to it I will but aside the delicacy aside and ask.
- Following the Equator
DECEIT
When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
DELICACY
Delicacy--a sad, sad false delicacy--robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 9/19/1877
DEMOCRACY
Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
DENTISTS
When teeth became touched with decay or were otherwise ailing, the doctor knew of but one thing to do--he fetched his tongs and dragged them out. If the jaw remained, it was not his fault.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
DESIRE
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it--namely, in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
DIET
In the manner of diet--I have been persistently strict in sticking to the things which didn't agree with me until one or the other of us got the best of it.
- 70th birthday speech
DIFFERENCE
The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.
- Letter to George Bainton, 10/15/1888
People are different. And it is the best way.
-Tom Sawyer, Detective
DILIGENCE
Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more--restful.
- Speech, 3/30/1901
DINOSAUR
As for the dinosaur--But Noah's conscience was easy; it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal, and America had not then been discovered.
- "Adam's Soliloquy"
DIPLOMACY
I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says--"Yes; the little ones does."
- Tom Sawyer Abroad
DISAPPOINTMENT
One cannot have everything the way he would like it. A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
DISCOVERY
What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not see before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea-an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before. To be the first--that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else--these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. Lifetimes of ecstasy crowded into a single moment.
- Innocents Abroad
If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out; and I don't know but more so.
- Eve's Diary
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
- This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but the attribution cannot be verified. The quote should not be regarded as authentic.
DISHONESTY
Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
- Letter to Joseph Twichell, 3/14/1905
DOGS
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
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's Calendar
DROWNING
I was drowned seven times...before I learned to swim--once in Bear Creek and six times in the Mississippi. I do not know who the people were who interfered with the intentions of a Providence wiser than themselves but I hold a grudge against them yet.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
DRUNKENESS
What marriage is to morality, a properly conducted licensed liquor traffic is to sobriety.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1895
Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink-- under any circumstances.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink.
- Notebook #42, 1898
DUELS
In those early days dueling suddenly became a fashion in the new territory of Nevada and by 1864 everybody was anxious too have a chance in the new sport, mainly for the reason that he was not able to thoroughly respect himself so long as he had not killed or crippled somebody in a duel or been killed or crippled in one himself....I was ambitious in several ways but I had entirely escaped the seductions of that particular craze. I had had no desire to fight a duel. I had no intention of provoking one. I did not feel respectable but I got a certain amount of satisfaction out of feeling safe. I was ashamed of myself...but I got along well enough. I had always been accustomed to feeling ashamed of myself, for one thing or another, so there was no novelty for me in the situation. I bore it very well.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
I thoroughly disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise and I know they are dangerous. Also, sinful. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet retired spot and kill him.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
This pastime is as common in Austria to-day as it is in France. But with this difference--that here in the Austrian states the duel is dangerous, while in France it is not. Here it is tragedy, in France it is comedy; here it is a solemnity, there it is monkeyshines; here the duelist risks his life, there he does not even risk his shirt. Here he fights with pistol or saber, in France with a hairpin--a blunt one. Here the desperately wounded man tries to walk to the hospital; there they paint the scratch so that they can find it again, lay the sufferer on a stretcher, and conduct him off the field with a band of music.
- "Dueling," Europe and Elsewhere
EARLY RISING
Well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they can't sleep anyhow.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
EARTHQUAKE
I will set it down here as a maxim that the operations of the human intellect are much accelerated by an earthquake. Usually I do not think rapidly--but I did upon this occasion. I thought rapidly, vividly, and distinctly. With the first shock of the five, I thought--"I recognize that motion--this is an earthquake." With the second, I thought, "What a luxury this will be for the morning papers." With the third shock, I thought, "Well my boy, you had better be getting out of this." Each of these thoughts was only the hundredth part of a second in passing through my mind. There is no incentive to rapid reasoning like an earthquake. I then sidled out toward the middle of the street- and I may say that I sidled out with some degree of activity, too. There is nothing like an earthquake to hurry a man when he starts to go anywhere.
- "The Great Earthquake in San Francisco," New York Weekly Review, 11/25/1865
EDITORS
How often we recall, with regret, that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity, that his intentions were good.
- Letter to Henry Alden, 11/11/1906
I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words.
- Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Fisher
EDUCATION
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.
- Speech 11/23/1900
I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.
- "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation," 1867
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
ELECTIONS
If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
EQUALITY
There are many humorous things in the world: among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
- Following the Equator
ETERNITY
We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
EVOLUTION
I believe our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed in the monkey.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
It now seems plain to me that that theory ought to be vacated in favor of a new and truer one...the Descent of Man from the Higher Animals.
- "The Lowest Animal"
EXPERIENCE
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 she will also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
FAILURE
It is not in the least likely that any life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of the person who lived it.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
GAMBLING
It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and ply your hand for a hundred times what it worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to 'call', and you roll in the chips.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
...money and chips are flung upon the table, and the game seems to consist in the croupier's reaching for these things with a flexible oar, and raking them home. It appeared to be a rational enough game for him, and if I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed, but I didn't see where the entertainment of the others came in. This was because I saw without perceiving, and observed without understanding.
- "Aix, Paradixe of Rheumatics"
There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. The upper class knows very little about it. Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful. Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did now know the meaning of a "flush." It is enough to make one ashamed of one's species.
- quoted in A Bibliography of Mark Twain, Merle Johnson
GENIUS
Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered--either by themselves or by others.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
GERMAN
The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage. One tells them from vinegar by the label.
- A Tramp Abroad
A dog is "der Hund"; a woman is "die Frau"; a horse is "das Pferd"; now you put that dog in the genitive case, and is he the same dog he was before? No, sir; he is "des Hundes"; put him in the dative case and what is he? Why, he is "dem Hund." Now you snatch him into the accusative case and how is it with him? Why, he is "den Hunden." But suppose he happens to be twins and you have to pluralize him- what then? Why, they'll swat that twin dog around through the 4 cases until he'll think he's an entire international dog-show all in is own person. I don't like dogs, but I wouldn't treat a dog like that--I wouldn't even treat a borrowed dog that way. Well, it's just the same with a cat. They start her in at the nominative singular in good health and fair to look upon, and they sweat her through all the 4 cases and the 16 the's and when she limps out through the accusative plural you wouldn't recognize her for the same being. Yes, sir, once the German language gets hold of a cat, it's goodbye cat. That's about the amount of it.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German.
- Notebook #14, 11/1877 - 7/1878
I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.
- A Tramp Abroad
GOD
I am plenty safe enough in his hands; I am not in any danger from that kind of a Deity. The one that I want to keep out of the reach of, is the caricature of him which one finds in the Bible. We (that one and I) could never respect each other, never get along together. I have met his superior a hundred times-- in fact I amount to that myself.
- Letter to Olivia Clemens, 7/17/1889
If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, "As unhappy as God."
- Notebook #24, April - Aug. 1885
"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?" ‑ Mark Twain
...a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell--mouths mercy, and invented hell--mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!
- No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger
Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million.
- Mark Twain
Some years ago on the gold coins we used to trust in God. It think it was in 1863 that some genious suggested that it be put on the gold and silver coins which circulated among the rich. They didn't put it on the nickels and coppers because they didn't think the poor folks had any trust in God....If I remember rightly, the President required or ordered the romoval of that sentence from the coins. Well, I didn't see that the statement ought to remain there. It wasn't true. But I think it would better read, "Within certain judicious limitations we trust in God, and if there isn't enough room on the coin for this, why enlarge the coin.
- Speech, 5/14/1908
More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent.
- letter to Clara Clemens, quoted in My Husband Gabrilowitsch)
If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks. He would not stoop to ask for any man's compliments, praises, flatteries; and He would be far above exacting them. I would have Him as self-respecting as the better sort of man in these regards.
He would not be a merchant, a trader. He would not buy these things. He would not sell, or offer to sell, temporary benefits of the joys of eternity for the product called worship. I would have Him as dignified as the better sort of man in this regard.
He would value no love but the love born of kindnesses conferred; not that born of benevolences contracted for. Repentance in a man's heart for a wrong done would cancel and annul that sin; and no verbal prayers for forgiveness be required or desired or expected of that man.
In His Bible there would be no Unforgiveable Sin. He would recognize in Himself the Author and Inventor of Sin and Author and Inventor of the Vehicle and Appliances for its commission; and would place the whole responsibility where it would of right belong: upon Himself, the only Sinner.
He would not be a jealous God--a trait so small that even men despise it in each other.
He would not boast.
He would keep private Hs admirations of Himself; He would regard self-praise as unbecoming the dignity of his position.
He would not have the spirit of vengeance in His heart. Then it would not issue from His lips.
There would not be any hell--except the one we live in from the cradle to the grave.
There would not be any heaven--the kind described in the world's Bibles.
He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when he could have made him happy with the same effort and he would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
It is the will of God that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision true--humor.
- Notebook, 1902
The best minds will tell you that when a man has begotten a child he is morally bound to tenderly care for it, protect it from hurt, shielf it from disease, clothe it, feed it, bear with its waywardness, lay no hand upon it save in kindness and for its own good, and never in any case inflict upon it a wanton cruelty. God's treatment of his earthly children, every day and every night, is the exact opposite of all that, yet those best minds warmly justify these crimes, condone them, excuse them, and indignantly refuse to regard them as crimes at all, when he commits them. Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind.
- Letters from the Earth
We have to keep our God placated with prayers, and even then we are never sure of him -- how much higher and finer is the Indian's God......Our illogical God is all-powerful in name, but impotent in fact; the Great Spirit is not all-powerful, but does the very best he can for his injun and does it free of charge.
- Marginalia written in copy of Richard Irving Dodge's Our Wild Indians
GOVERNMENT
...no country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more.
- The Gilded Age
The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble, through the rivaly of schools and creeds that are anxious to obtain official recognition, and there is great danger that our people will lose our independence of thought and action which is the cause of much of our greatness, and sink into the helplessness of the Frenchman or German who expects his government to feed him when hungry, clothe him when naked, to prescribe when his child may be born and when he may die, and, in fine, to regulate every act of humanity from the cradle to the tomb, including the manner in which he may seek future admission to paradise.
- "Official Physic," reprinted in The Twainian, 11/1943
GRAMMAR
No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done.
- "Christian Science"
GRIEF
The size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider's measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it. The king's lost crown is a vast matter to the king but of no consequence to the child. The lost toy is a great matter to the child but in the king's eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost--not another man's--is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases.
- "My Boyhood Dreams"
GUNS
Don't meddle with old unloaded firearms. They are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don't have to take any pains at all with them; you don't have to have a rest, you don't have to have any sights on the gun, you don't have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can't hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old rusty muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes me shudder.
- Advice to Youth speech, 4/15/1882
George Bemis . . . wore in his belt an old original "Allen" revolver, such as irreverent people called a "pepper-box." Simply drawing the trigger back, cocked and fired the pistol. As the trigger came back, the hammer would begin to rise and the barrel to turn over, and presently down would drop the hammer, and away would speed the ball. To aim along the turning barrel and hit the thing aimed at was a feat which was probably never done with an "Allen" in the world. But George's was a reliable weapon, nevertheless, because, as one of the stage-drivers afterward said, "If she didn't get what she went after, she would fetch something else." And so she did. She went after a deuce of spades nailed against a tree, once, and fetched a mule standing about thirty yards to the left of it. Bemis did not want the mule; but the owner came out with a double-barreled shotgun and persuaded him to buy it, anyhow. It was a cheerful weapon--the "Allen." Sometimes all its six barrels would go off at once, and then there was no safe place in all the region round about, but behind it.
- Roughing It
HAPPINESS
Happiness ain't a thing in itself--it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.
- Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
- The Mysterious Stranger
Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it.
- Letter to Will Bowen, 11/4/1888
HAT
...never run after your own hat--others will be delighted to do it. Why spoil their fun?- quoted in Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Fisher
HAWAII
The native language is soft and liquid and flexible and in every way efficient and satisfactory--till you get mad; then there you are; there isn't anything in it to swear with. Good judges all say it is the best Sunday language there is. But then all the other six days in the week it just hangs idle on your hands; it isn't any good for business and you can't work a telephone with it. Many a time the attention of the mssionaries has been called to this defect, and they are always promising they are going to fix it; but no, they go fooling along and fooling along and nothing is done.
- Mark Twain's Speeches, 1923 ed. "Welcome Home"
HEALTH
He had had much experience of physicians, and said "the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not."
- Following the Equator
There are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and ever 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.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
HEAVEN
Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 5/20/1891
Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
Let us swear while we may, for in Heaven it will not be allowed.
- Notebook, 1898
When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know have gone to better world, I am moved to lead a different life.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
HERESY
Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.
- "At the Shrine of St. Wagner"
HEROES
We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
Heroine: girl in a book who is saved from drowning by a hero and marries him next week, but if it was to be over again ten years later it is likely she would rather have a life-belt and he would rather have her have it.
Hero: person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
HEROINE
Heroine: girl who is perfectly charming to live with, in a book.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
HISTORY
Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: The conscientious historian will correct these defects."
- Acknowledgments for A Horse's Tale
It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
Many public-school children seem to know only two dates--1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.
- (and he said this over 100 years ago, sound familiar?)
HONESTY
There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition. There are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it.
- Following the Equator
Barring the natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough.
- "A Mysterious Visit," 1875
Honesty: the best of all the lost arts.
- Notebook, 1902
HOTELS
Hotels are the only proper places for lecturers. When I am ill-natured I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel where I can ring up a domestic and give him a quarter and then break furniture over him...
- quoted in My Father Mark Twain, Clara Clemens
HOUSE
...it is less trouble and more satisfaction to bury two families than to select and equip a home for one.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
HUMAN RACE
There isn't any way to libel the human race.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
Such is the human race. Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat.
- Christian Science
As to the human race. There are many pretty and winning things about the human race. It is perhaps the poorest of all the inventions of all the gods but it has never suspected it once. There is nothing prettier than its naive and complacent appreciation of itself. It comes out frankly and proclaims without bashfulness or any sign of a blush that it is the noblest work of God. It has had a billion opportunities to know better, but all signs fail with this ass. I could say harsh things about it but I cannot bring myself to do it--it is like hitting a child.
- Autobiographical dictation, June 25,1906 (reprinted in Hudson Review, Autumn 1963)
The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned.
- Notebook, 1898
Humor
Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.
-quoted in Mark Twain and I, Opie Read
IDEAS
The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas--it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.
- "Some National Stupidities"
IDIOTS
Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane...
- quoted in Isabel Lyon's Journal, 2/15/1906
In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.
- Following the Equator; Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
IGNORANCE
The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
- Mark Twain's Speeches, 1910 ed.
...one should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 5/12/1899
IMMORALITY
There is 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.
- Follow the Equator
IMMORTALITY
On of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world was flat.
- Notebook, 1900
I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet -- I am inclined to expect one.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
IMPOSSIBILITY
Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen.
- Autobiography of Mark Twain
INDECENCY
Each race determines for itself what indecencies are. Nature knows no indecencies; man invents them.
- Notebook, 1896
INDIANS
I said there was nothing so convincing to an Indian as a general massacre. If he could not approve of the massacre, I said the next surest thing for an Indian was soap and education. Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run; because a half-massacred Indian may recover, but if you educate him and wash him, it is bound to finish him some time or other.
- "Facts Concerning the Recent Resignation"
We have to keep our God placated with prayers, and even then we are never sure of him--how much higher and finer is the Indian's God......Our illogical God is all-powerful in name, but impotent in fact; the Great Spirit is not all-powerful, but does the very best he can for his injun and does it free of charge.
- Marginalia written in copy of Richard Irving Dodge's Our Wild Indians
INGRATITUDE
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
INHERITANCE
When we inherit property, it does not occur to us to throw it away, even when we do not want it.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
THE INNOCENTS ABROAD
When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.
- Letter to unidentified person, 11/6/1886
INSANITY
...we all know that in all matters of mere opinion that [every] man is insane--just as insane as we are...we know exactly where to put our finger upon his insanity: it is where his opinion differs from ours....All Democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it. None but the Republicans. All the Republicans are insane, but only the Democrats can perceive it. The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
- Christian Science
The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials.
- Following the Equator
No man has a wholly undiseased mind; in one way or another all men are mad.
- "The Memorable Assassination"
INSTITUTIONS
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.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
INSULTS
I do not believe I could learn to like her except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
INVENTION
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accidents
- Mark Twain's Notebook
A man invents a thing which could revolutionize the arts, produce mountains of money, and bless the earth, and who will bother with it or show any interest in it?--and so you are just as poor as you were before. But you invent some worthless thing to amuse yourself with, and would throw it away if let alone, and all of a sudden the whole world makes a snatch for it and out crops a fortune.
- The American Claimant
IRREVERENCE
True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
JAILS
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.
- speech, 11/23/1900
JESUS
Jesus died to save men--a small thing for an immortal to do, & didn't save many, anyway; but if he had been damned for the race that would have been act of a size proper to a god, & would have saved the whole race. However, why should anybody want to save the human race, or damn it either? Does God want its society? Does Satan?
- Notebook #42
JOURNAL
If you wish to inflict a heartless and malignant punishment upon a young person, pledge him to keep a journal a year.
- The Innocents Abroad
JOY
Grief can take care of itself, but to get full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
JUDGMENT
You cannot depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
JURY
We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world; and its efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read.
- 4th of July speech 1873
KILLING
If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done--these are traits of the human race at large. We white people are merely modified Thugs; Thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization; Thugs who long ago enjoyed the slaughter of the Roman arena, and later the burning of doubtful Christians by authentic Christians in the public squares, and who now, with the Thugs of Spain and Nimes, flock to enjoy the blood and misery of the bull-ring. We have no tourists of either sex or any religion who are able to resist the delights of the bull-ring when opportunity offers; and we are gentle Thugs in the hunting-season, and love to chase a tame rabbit and kill it. Still, we have made some progress--microscopic, and in truth scarcely worth mentioning, and certainly nothing to be proud of--still it is progress: we no longer take pleasure in slaughtering or burning helpless men. We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way.
- Following the Equator
RUDYARD 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.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
KNOWLEDGE
We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
- A Tramp Abroad
LAW
We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain.
- 4th of July speech, 1873
In this topsy-turvy, crazy, illogical world, Man has made laws for himself. He has fenced himself round with them, mainly with the idea of keeping communities together, and gain for the strongest. No woman was consulted in the making of laws. And nine-tenths of the people who are daily obeying--or fighting against--Nature's laws, have no real opinion. Opinion means deduction, after weighing the matter, and deep thought upon it. They simply echo feeling, because for generations forbears have laid something down as an axiom. They do not investigate or weigh for themselves. The axiom of the forbears was, 'It is immoral to follow God's law, unless bound by man's law and a wedding ring.'
- quoted in Mark Twain on Three Weeks, Elinor Glyn
It would not be possible for Noah to do in our day what he was permitted to do in his own...The inspector would come and examine the Ark, and make all sorts of objections.
- "About All Kinds of Ships," 1892
LAWYER
They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin' ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property.
- Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass letter, Keokuk Saturday Post, Nov. 1, 1856
Heaven knows insanity was disreputable enough, long ago; but now that the lawyers have got to cutting every gallows rope and picking every prison lock with it, it is become a sneaking villainy that ought to hang and keep on hanging its sudden possessors until evil-doers should conclude that the safest plan was to never claim to have it until they came by it legitimately. The very calibre of the people the lawyers most frequently try to save by the insanity subterfuge ought to laugh the plea out of the courts, one would think.
- "Unburlesquable Things," The Galaxy Magazine, July 1870
LAZINESS
I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
Honest poverty and a conscience torpid through virtuous inaction are more to me than corner lots and praise.
- "A Cat-Tale"
LEADERSHIP
A statesman gains little by the arbitrary exercise of ironclad authority upon all occasions that offer, for this wounds the just pride of his subordinates, and thus tends to undermine his strength. A little concession, now and then, where it can do no harm is the wiser policy.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Legislatures
...it's so hard to find men of a so high type of morals that they'll stay bought.
- Notebook for Aug. 1890-June 1891
LETTERS
An old, cold letter ....makes you wonder how you could ever have got into such a rage about nothing.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
The most useful and interesting letters we get here from home are from children seven or eight years old...They write simply and naturally and without strain for effect. They tell all they know, and stop.
- article in Grass Valley, Ca. Daily National, 12/6/1869
LIBERTY
Irreverence is the champion of liberty.
- Notebook, 1888
LIBRARY
But the truth is, that when a Library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.
- Letter to Mrs. F. G. Whitmore, 2/7/1907
LICENSE PLATES
Everyday throughout America, the Overspeeder runs over somebody and "escapes." That is the way it reads. At present the 'mobile numbers are so small that ordinary eyes cannot read them, upon a swiftly receding machine, at a distance of a hundred feet--a distance which the machine has covered before the spectator can adjust his focus. I think I would amend the law. I would enlarge the numbers, and make them readable at a hundred yards. For overspeeding--first offence--I would enlarge the figures again, and make them readable at three hundred yards--this in place of a fine, and as a warning to pedestrians to climb a tree.
- "Overspeeding," Harper's Weekly, 11/5/1905 (from a letter to the editor dated 10/18/1905)
LIES
Carlyle said "a lie cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography; Mark Twain in Eruption
Lie--an abomination before the Lord and an ever present help in time of trouble.
- 3/30/1901
One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson
I am different from Washington; I have a higher, grander standard of principle. Washington could not lie. I can lie, but I won't.
- quoted in Mark Twain, Henderson
It is true I have a passion for lying to rich people, but I do not lie to men who get their bread by thankless hard work.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 10/28/1889
A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.
- This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but it has never been verified as originating with Twain. This quote may have originated with Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92) who attributed it to an old proverb in a sermon delivered on Sunday morning, April 1, 1855. Spurgeon was a celebrated English fundamentalist Baptist preacher. His words were: "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on."
LIFE
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
- The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy of the Extraordinary Twins
He had arrived at that point where presently the illusions would cease and he would have entered upon the realities of life, and God help the man that has arrived at that point.
- Jack Van Nostrand speech, 1905
Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value.
- Notebook, 1902
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.
- Notebook, 1898
It is not likely that any complete life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of the person who lived it.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903
LIGHTNING
The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether--Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there.
- "The Weather," Mark Twain's Speeches
LITERATURE
My books are water; those of the great geniuses is wine. Everybody drinks water.
- Notebook, 1885
LONELINESS
I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them....The Garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change--anything for society.
-Mark Twain, a Biography
LONESOME
Be good and you will be lonesome.
- frontispiece from first edition of Following the Equator
LOVE
Love is a madness; if thwarted it develops fast.
- "The Memorable Assassination"
LUCK
It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
MAN
What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principle one was that they escaped teething.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
There are three kinds of people--Commonplace Men, Remarkable Men, and Lunatics.
- Following the Equator
Oh, this infernal Human Race! I wish I had it in the Ark again--with an auger!
- The American Academy of Arts and Letters pamphlet, "In Memory of Samuel Langhorne Clemens"
I am the only man living who understands human nature; God has put me in charge of this branch office; when I retire there will be no-one to take my place. I shall keep on doing my duty, for when I get over on the other side, I shall use my influence to have the human race drowned again, and this time drowned good, no omissions, no Ark.
- quoted in Mark Twain, J. Macy, (Doubleday, Page & co., 1913)
Man was made at the end of the week's work, when God was tired.
- Notebook, 1903; Mark Twain, a Biography
Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion-- several of them.
- "The Lowest Animal," 1897
Man is a Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute.
- "The Lowest Animal," 1897
God's noblest work? Man. Who found it out? Man.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
He equips the Creator with every trait that goes to the making of a fiend, and then arrives at the conclusion that a fiend and a father are the same thing! Yet he would deny that a malevolent lunatic and a Sunday school superintendent are essentially the same. What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind.
- Letters from the Earth
MARTYRDOM
But men's hearts are so made that the sight of one voluntary victim for a noble idea stirs them more deeply than the sight of a crowd submitting to a dire fate they cannot escape.
- Letter to the editor of Free Russia, 1890
MINERS
Now, here is a gold-miner's compliment, and this one is forty-two years old. I remember the circumstances perfectly well. It was the introduction of Mark Twain, lecturer, to an audience of gold-miners at Red Dog, California, in 1866, by one of themselves. It was in a log house, a large school-house, and the audience occupied benches without any back, and there were no ladies present, they did n't know me then; but all just miners with their breeches tucked into their boot-tops. And they wanted somebody to introduce me to them, and they pitched upon this miner, and he objected. He said he had never appeared in public, and had never done any work of this kind; but they said it did n't matter, and so he came on the stage with me and introduced me in this way. He said:
"I don't know anything about this man, anyway. I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail; and the other is, I don't know why."
- Speech, 1908
MIRACLE
The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.
- "Official Report to the I.I.A.S," Letters From the Earth
MISSIONARIES
Charles Henry Twain lived during the latter part of the seventeenth century, and was a zealous and distinguished missionary. He converted sixteen thousand South Sea islanders, and taught them that a dog-tooth necklace and a pair of spectacles was not enough clothing to come to divine service in. His poor flock loved him very, very dearly; and when his funeral was over, they got up in a body (and came out of the restaurant) with tears in their eyes, and saying, one to another, that he was a good tender missionary, and they wished they had some more of him.
- A Burlesque Autobiography
O kind missionary, O compassionate missionary, leave China! Come home and convert these Christians.
- "The United States of Lyncherdom"
...missionarying was a better thing in those days than it is in ours. All you had to do was to cure the head savage's sick daughter by a miracle--a miracle like the miracle of Lourdes in our day, for instance--and immediately that head savage was your convert, and filled to the eyes with a new convert's enthusiasm. You could sit down and make yourself easy now. He would take the ax and convert the rest of the nation himself.
- "Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty"
MISSISSIPPI RIVER
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
- Life on the Mississippi
MODESTY
I was born modest; not all over, but in spots.
- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
MONARCHY
There are shams and shams; there are frauds and frauds, but the transparentest of all is the sceptered one. We see monarchs meet and go through solemn ceremonies, farces, with straight countenances; but it is not possible to imagine them meeting in private and not laughing in each other's faces.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
It is hard enough luck being a monarch, without being a target also.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
The first gospel of all monarchies should be rebellion; the second should be Rebellion; and the third and all gospels and the only gospel in any monarchy should be Rebellion against Church and State.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
MONEY
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, & over these ideals they dispute & cannot unite--but they all worship money.
- Mark Twain's Notebook
MORAL SENSE
There is a moral sense and there is an immoral sense. History shows that the moral sense enables us to see morality and how to avoid it, and that the immoral sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
MORALITY
The low level which commercial morality has reached in America is deplorable. We have humble God fearing Christian men among us who will stoop to do things for a million dollars that they ought not to be willing to do for less than 2 millions.
- Notebook, 1902
MORALS
It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like to ask. I know I have. But I'd rather teach them than practice them any day. "Give them to others"--that's my motto.
- "Morals and Memory" speech
As by the fires of experience, so by commission of crime you learn real morals. Commit all crimes, familiarize yourself with all sins, take them in rotation (there are only two or three thousand of them), stick to it, commit two or three every day, and by and by you will be proof against them. When you are through you will be proof against all sins and morally perfect. You will be vaccinated against every possible commission of them. This is the only way.
- On Being Morally Perfect
MOUNTAIN CLIMBING
I would rather face whole Hyde Parks of artillery than the ghastly forms of death which he has faced among the peaks and precipices of the mountains. There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it. I have not jumped to this conclusion; I have traveled to it per gravel train, so to speak. I have thought the thing all out, and am quite sure I am right. A born climber's appetite for climbing is hard to satisfy; when it comes upon him he is like a starving man with a feast before him; he may have other business on hand, but it must wait.
- A Tramp Abroad
MUSIC
When you want genuine music--music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,--when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!
- "Enthusiastic Eloquence," San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 6/23/1865
NAMES
...it must be intensely annoying to the spirit of a defunct warrior to know that, after having laid down his life for fame, his name has been misspelt in the papers.
- Letter of Quintus Curtius Snodgrass, reprinted in The Twainian, 7/1942
NOAH
As for the dinosaur--But Noah's conscience was easy; it was not named in his cargo list and he and the boys were not aware that there was such a creature. He said he could not blame himself for not knowing about the dinosaur, because it was an American animal, and America had not then been discovered.
- "Adam's Soliloquy"
OBEDIENCE
Always obey your parents, when they are present. Most parents think they know more than you do; and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgement.
- Advice to Youth, 4/15/1882
OBSESSION
To a man all things are possible but one--he cannot have a hole in the seat of his breeches and keep his fingers out of it. A man does seem to feel more distress and more persistent and distracting solicitude about such a thing than he could about a sick child that was threatening to grow worse every time he took his attention away from it.
- Letter to W. D. Howells, 6/27/1878
OPPORTUNITY
I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
PATIENCE
All good things arrive unto them that wait--and don't die in the meantime.
- Letter to Orion and Jane Clemens, 4/3/1889 (in reference to the Paige typesetter)
PEACE
Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.
- Letter to William T. Stead, 1/9/1899
PEACE OF MIND
Peace of mind is a most valuable thing. The Bible has robbed the majority of the world of it during many centuries; it is but fair that in return it should give some to an individual here & there. But you must not make the mistake of supposing that absolute peace of mind is obtainable only through some form religious belief: no, on the contrary I have found that as perfect a peace is to be found in absolute unbelief.
- Letter to Charles W. Stoddard, 6/1/1885
PERCEPTION
Distance lends enchantment to the view.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
PESSIMISM
It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson
There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903
...the man who isn't a pessimist is a damned fool.
- Mark Twain, a Biography
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903
PHOTOGRAPHS
No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody--hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the meekest of men; depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians; gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and a fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom. If a man tries to look serious when he sits for his picture the photograph makes him look as solemn as an owl; if he smiles, the photograph smirks repulsively; if he tries to look pleasant, the photograph looks silly; if he makes the fatal mistake of attempting to seem pensive, the camera will surely write him down as an ass. The sun never looks through the photographic instrument that it does not print a lie. The piece of glass it prints it on is well named a "negative"--a contradiction--a misrepresentation--a falsehood. I speak feeling of this matter, because by turns the instrument has represented me to be a lunatic, a Soloman, a missionary, a burglar and an abject idiot, and I am neither. - Letter to the Sacramento Daily Union, written July 1, 1866
A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever.
- quoted by Elizabeth Wallace in Mark Twain and the Happy Island, 1913
PIRATES
Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
- Life on the Mississippi
PLEASURE
There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort.
- Mark Twain in Eruption
There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it.
- A Tramp Abroad
PLEDGE
...to make a pledge of any kind is to declare war against nature; for a pledge is a chain that is always clanking and reminding the wearer of it that he is not a free man.
- Following the Equator
Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor into good, but it will improve it.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
PLUMBER
When we were finishing our house, we found we had a little cash left over, on account of the plumber not knowing it.
- "The McWilliamses and the Burlar Alarm"
POETRY
My usual style of ciphering out the merits of poetry, which is to read a line or two near the top, a verse near the bottom and then strike an average...
- "Answers to Correspondents"
POKER
There are few things that are so unpardonably neglected in our country as poker. The upper class knows very little about it. Now and then you find ambassadors who have sort of a general knowledge of the game, but the ignorance of the people is fearful. Why, I have known clergymen, good men, kind-hearted, liberal, sincere, and all that, who did not know the meaning of a "flush." It is enough to make one ashamed of one's species.
- quoted in A Bibliography of Mark Twain, Merle Johnson
POLITICIANS
History has tried hard to teach us that we can't have good government under politicians. Now, to go and stick one at the very head of the government couldn't be wise.
- New York Herald, 8/26/1876
POLYGAMY
No man can serve two masters.
-quoted in Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain, Alex Ayers (no primary source given)
POPULARITY
Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right.- Notebook, 1902
The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.
- Notebook, 1895
Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by you only regret that you didn't see him do it.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
POWER
The Autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze.
- Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
PREJUDICE
I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
- "Concerning the Jews"