“Names are not always what they seem.”

—  Mark Twain

Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

Last update Sept. 28, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Names are not always what they seem." by Mark Twain?
Mark Twain photo
Mark Twain 637
American author and humorist 1835–1910

Related quotes

Meles Zenawi photo

“Africa's downfall has always been the cult of the personality. And their names always seem to begin with M. We've had Mobutu and Mengistu and I'm not going to add Meles to the list.”

Meles Zenawi (1955–2012) Ethiopian politician; Prime Minister of Ethiopia

Meles Zenawi, as quoted in Jonathan Dimbleby, "Ethiopia proves there can be life after death", The Guardian, 28 July, 2002.

Anna Akhmatova photo

“From childhood I have been afraid
of mummers. It always seemed
an extra shadow
without face or name
had slipped among them…”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

Rachel Caine photo

“What was your name again?"
"Still Eve."
"No, I'm sure it's something else. That doesn't seem right.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Bite Club

Hubert H. Humphrey photo

“In real life, unlike in Shakespeare, the sweetness of the rose depends upon the name it bears. Things are not only what they are. They are, in very important respects, what they seem to be.”

Hubert H. Humphrey (1911–1978) Vice-President of the USA under Lyndon B. Johnson

Speech, March 26, 1966, Washington, D.C., quoted in Robert Andrews, The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations (1993)

Nathaniel Hawthorne photo

“What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in?”

The Blithedale Romance (1852)
Context: What, in the name of common-sense, had I to do with any better society than I had always lived in? It had satisfied me well enough. My pleasant bachelor-parlor, sunny and shadowy, curtained and carpeted, with the bedchamber adjoining... my evening at the billiard club, the concert, the theatre, or at somebody's party, if I pleased - what could be better than all this? Was it better to hoe, to mow, to toil and moil amidst the accumulations of a barnyard; to be the chambermaid of two yoke of oxen and a dozen cows; to eat salt beef, and earn it with the sweat of my brow, and thereby take the tough morsel out of some wretch's mouth, into whose vocation I had thrust myself?

“Hindu tolerance, it seems, is another name for Hindu cowardice.”

Girilal Jain (1924–1993) Indian journalist

Source: quoted in Goel, S.R. Hindu Temples – What Happened to Them, Volume I (1990) Preface, 2nd edition, p. xvii

Rachel Caine photo

“What’s her name? Claire, what’s her name?”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Black Dawn

Bill Cosby photo
Richard Rohr photo

“Life is not a matter of creating a special name for ourselves, but of uncovering the name we have always had.”

Richard Rohr (1943) American spiritual writer, speaker, teacher, Catholic Franciscan priest

Source: Immortal Diamond: The Search for Our True Self

Nassim Nicholas Taleb photo

“It is my great hope someday, to see science and decision makers rediscover what the ancients have always known. Namely that our highest currency is respect.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Related topics