Mark Twain: Trending quotes (page 10)

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“These wisdoms are for the luring of youth toward high moral altitudes. The author did not gather them from practice, but from observation. To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.”

Mark Twain book Following the Equator

The Pudd'nhead Maxims, preface
Following the Equator (1897)

Wisdom , Youth

“… from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this.)”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 46

World

“…my sister…was an interested and zealous invalid during sixty-five years, tried all the new diseases as fast as they came out, and always enjoyed the newest one more than any that went before; my brother had accumulated forty-two brands of Christianity before he was called away.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 393

Disease , Sister

“She takes an undaughterful pleasure in noting that now the newspapers are beginning to concede with heartiness that she does not need the help of my name, but can make her way quite satisfactorily upon her own merits. This is insubordination, and must be crushed.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 14, of his daughter's, Clara's, incipient career as a concert vocalist

Pleasure , Way , Help

“I had now—not for the first time, nor the thousandth—trampled upon an old and wise and stern maxim of mine, to wit: "Supposing is good, but finding out is better."”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 99

Time

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

Mark Twain

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

Weather

“I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”

Mark Twain book The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County"; first published as "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog" in the New York Saturday Press, 18 November 1865; revised by the author and reprinted the following month in The Californian; first anthologized in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches http://books.google.com/books?id=kqMDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA17 (1867), ed. John Paul

“Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that "plagiarism" farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances — is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men — but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some degree, and we call it his; but there are others that contributed. It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite”

Mark Twain

that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.
Letter to Helen Keller, after she had been accused of plagiarism for one of her early stories (17 March 1903), published in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 1 (1917) edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, p. 731

Men , Soul , Idea , Parting

“Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience — 4000 critics.”

Mark Twain

Letter to Pamela Clemens Moffet, 9 November 1869, in Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain's Letters: Arranged with Comment (1917), Vol. 1, p. 168 http://books.google.com/books?id=Ia8hAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA168

Appearance , Time , Night

“The first thing I ever noticed about Miss Lyon was her incredible laziness. Laziness was my own specialty, & I did not like this competition. Dear me, I was to find out, in the course of time, that in the matter of laziness I was a runaway train on a down grade & she a-standing still. At my very laziest I could hear myself whiz, when she was around.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 386

Time , Training

“Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs—the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest—you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.”

Mark Twain

About Margaret Deland's book John Ward, Preacher
Mark Twain's Notebook (1935)

Feeling , Failure , Hell , Strong

“…it seems to be a law of the human constitution that those that deserve shall not have, and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having. It is a sufficiently crazy arrangement, it seems to me.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 245

Law

“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?”

Mark Twain

Notebook #42

Men , God

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

Mark Twain

Max Müller, India: What Can India Teach Us? (1883), p. 15 http://books.google.com/books?id=pIVDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA15&dq=%22most+valuable+and+most+instructive+materials+in+the+history+of+man+are+treasured+up+in+India%22
Misattributed

History

“It is a pity we can't escape from life when we are young.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 120

Life

“Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 442

“I think the President is clearly insane in several ways, and insanest upon war and its supreme glories. I think he longs for a big war wherein he can spectacularly perform as chief general and chief admiral, and go down in history as the only monarch of modern times that has served both offices at the same time.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 3 (2015), p. 173, of Theodore Roosevelt

War , Way , History , Thinking

“When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Vol. 2 (2013), p. 4

Life , World , Gauge , Personality

“Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”

Mark Twain book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Source: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), Ch. 22

“The late Bill Nye once said "I have been told that Wagner's music is better than it sounds."”

Mark Twain

Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 288

Music