Mark Twain
[Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835-1910)
American author,
master of humor and sarcasm
If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no
heroes.
-- Mark Twain, Autobiography
Irreverence is the champion of liberty
and its only sure defense.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook
(1888)
Man has been here 32,000 years. That it
took a hundred million years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is
what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now
representing the world's age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its
summit would represent man's share of that age; & anybody would perceive
that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would. I dunno.
-- Mark Twain,
"Was the World Made for Man?"
Man is a marvelous curiosity … he thinks
he is the Creator's pet … he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion
for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out
of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea.
-- Mark Twain:
Satan, writing back to his friends in Heaven upon visiting Earth, showing his
contempt toward this curious invention, Man, after having a few days earlier
earlier been banished for a thousand years for so doing prior to investigation,
in Letters from the Earth (1909?;
published in 1962)
He killed all those people -- every
male.
They had offended the Deity in some way. We know what
the offense was, without looking; that is to say, we know it was a trifle; some
small thing that no one but a god would attach any importance to. It is more
than likely that a Midianite had been duplicating the conduct of one Onan, who
was commanded to "go into his brother's wife" -- which he did; but
instead of finishing, "he spilled it on the ground." The Lord slew
Onan for that, for the lord could never abide indelicacy....
Some Midianite must have repeated Onan's act, and
brought that dire disaster upon his nation. If that was not the indelicacy that
outraged the feelings of the Deity, then I know what it was: some Midianite had
been pissing against the wall. I am sure of it, for that was an impropriety
which the Source of all Etiquette never could stand. A person could piss
against a tree, he could piss on his mother, he could piss on his own breeches,
and get off, but he must not piss against the wall -- that would be going quite
too far. The origin of the divine prejudice against this humble crime is not
stated; but we know that the prejudice was very strong -- so strong that
nothing but a wholesale massacre of the people inhabiting the region where the
wall was defiled could satisfy the Deity.
-- Mark Twain:
Satan, writing back to his friends in Heaven upon visiting Earth, this time
discussing the biblical tale of "The Slaughter of the Midianites" in
Numbers 31, in Letters from the Earth
(1909?; published in 1962) ††
There are those who scoff at the school
boy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the schoolboy who said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
-- Mark Twain, Following
the Equator, ch. 12, "Pudd'nhead
One of the proofs of the immortality of
the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world
was flat.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook
(1900)
The gods offer no rewards for intellect.
There was never one yet that showed any interest in it.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook
I cannot see how a man of any large
degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut
the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.
-- Mark Twain,
Frederick Anderson, ed., Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals (1979),
notebook 27, August 1887-July 1888, quoted from James A Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo"
(1996)
God's inhumanity to man makes countless
thousands mourn.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook
Satan hasn't a single salaried helper;
the Opposition employ a million.
-- Mark Twain,
quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations,
Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
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
Leaving out the gamblers, the burglars,
and the plumbers, perhaps we do put our trust in God after a fashion. But,
after all, it is an overstatement.
If the cholera or black plague should come to these shores, perhaps the bulk of
the nation would pray to be delivered from it, but the rest would put their
trust in The Health Board.
-- Mark Twain,
speech, "Education and Citizenship," quoted from Barbara Schmidt,
ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
What God lacks is convictions --
stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something
-- not try to be everything.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook,
quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations,
Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
Irreverence is another person's
disrespect to your god; there isn't any word that tells what your disrespect to
his god is.
-- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
Concentration of power in a political
machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was
invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to
human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and
scattered condition.
-- Mark Twain, A
Let me make the superstitions of a nation
and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.
-- Mark Twain, Following
the Equator, ch. 51, "Pudd'nhead
A man is accepted into a church for what
he believes and he is turned out for what he knows.
-- Mark Twain,
quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations,
Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
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!
-- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger
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, shield 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.
-- Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth
If Christ were here there is one thing
he would not be -- a Christian.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook
There has been only one Christian. They
caught him and crucified him -- early.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook
(1898)
... the swindle
of life and the treachery of a God that can create disease and misery and crime
-- create things that men would be condemned for creating-- that men would be
ashamed to create.
-- Mark Twain,
quoted in Isabel Lyon's Journal (February 2, 1906), quoted from Barbara
Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
Mine was a trained Presbyterian
conscience and knew but the one duty -- to hunt and harry its slave upon all
pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no
sense nor reason in it.
-- Mark Twain, Autobiography
Presbyterianism without infant damnation
would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had
lost its tag.
-- Mark Twain, from
Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from
Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
It has taken a weary long time to
persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it
the best they can.
-- Mark Twain, Is Shakespeare Dead?
I bring you the stately matron named
Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate
raids in Kiao-Chou,
-- Mark Twain,
speech, "A Salutation from the 19th to the 20th Century" (December
31, 1900)
The so-called Christian nations are the
most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not
because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the
day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth
was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against
Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by
bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in
architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.
-- Mark Twain, from
Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from
Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
This is a Christian country. Why, so is hell. Inasmuch as "Strait is the way and narrow is the
gate, and few -- few -- are they that enter in thereat" has had the
natural effect of making hell the only really prominent Christian community in
any of the worlds; but we don't brag of this and certainly it is not proper to
brag and boast that America is a Christian country when we all know that
certainly five-sixths of our population could not enter in at the narrow gate.
-- Mark Twain, in
Bernard DeVoto, ed., Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940), quoted from Barbara Schmidt,
ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
Some years ago on the gold coins we used
to trust in God. It think it was in 1863 that some
genius 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.
-- Mark Twain,
speech (May 14, 1908) quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
The motto stated a lie. If this nation
has ever trusted in God, that time has gone by; for
nearly half a century almost its entire trust has been in the Republican party
and the dollar -- mainly the dollar. I recognize that I am only making an
assertion and furnishing no proof; I am sorry, but this is a habit of mine;
sorry also that I am not alone in it; everybody seems to have this disease.
-- Mark Twain, in
Bernard DeVoto, ed., Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940), quoted from Barbara Schmidt,
ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
You can never find a Christian who has
acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the
everlasting and all-sufficient "people say."
-- Mark Twain, Autobiography
I found out that I was a Christian for
revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble.
-- Mark Twain, in
Bernard DeVoto, ed., Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events (1940), quoted from Barbara Schmidt,
ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
Nothing agrees with me. If I drink
coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go
to church, it gives me dysentery.
-- Mark Twain,
letter to Henry H Rogers (August 7, 1905), quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed.,
"Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
We may not doubt that society in heaven
consists mainly of undesirable persons.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook
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.
-- Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad
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.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook,
quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations,
Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
Most people are bothered by those
passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me
are those I do understand.
-- Mark Twain,
quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations,
Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
I am plenty safe enough in his hands; I
am not in any danger from that kind of a Diety. 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.
-- Mark Twain,
letter to Livy (July 17, 1889), quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
When one reads Bibles, one is less
surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
-- Mark Twain, Mark
Twain's Notebook
It is full of interest. It has noble
poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some
good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.
-- Mark Twain, Letters From the Earth (1909?; published in 1962)
The two Testaments are interesting, each
in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he
was before he got religion, the other one gives us a
picture of him as he appeared afterward.
-- Mark Twain, Letters From the Earth (1909?; published in 1962)
God, so atrocious in
the Old Testament, so attractive in the New -- the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred
romance.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook
(1904)
The Christian's Bible is a drug store.
Its contents remain the same; but the medical practice changes.... The world
has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to
drop in at the tail of the procession -- and take the credit of the correction.
During many ages there were witches. The Bible said so. the
Bible commanded that they should not be allowed to live. Therefore the Church,
after eight hundred years, gathered up its halters, thumb-screws, and
firebrands, and set about its holy work in earnest. She worked hard at it night
and day during nine centuries and imprisoned, tortured, hanged, and burned
whole hordes and armies of witches, and washed the Christian world clean with
their foul blood.
Then it was discovered that there was no such thing as
witches, and never had been. One does not know whether to laugh or to cry....
There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed.
Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text
remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but
the texts that authorized them remain.
-- Mark Twain,
"Bible Teaching and
Religious Practice,"
To this day I cherish an unappeasable
bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only
permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was
15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again this
side of the grave....
Most honestly do I wish I could say a softening word
or two in defence of Huck's character, since you wish it, but really in my
opinion it is no better than those of Solomon, David, Satan, and the rest of
the sacred brotherhood.
If there is an unexpurgated in the Children's
Department, won't you please help that young woman remove Huck and Tom from that
questionable companionship?
-- Mark Twain, letter to librarian Asa Don Dickinson
(November 21, 1905) on the removal of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn
from the Children's section to the Adults seciton at Sheepshead Bay Branch,
Brooklyn Public Library, quoted from the Autobiography (blue cover
edition)
I purpose publishing these Letters here
in the world before I return to you. Two editions. One, unedited, for Bible readers and their children; the other,
expurgated, for persons of refinement.
-- Mark Twain:
Satan, writing back to his friends in Heaven upon visiting Earth, in Letters from the Earth (1909?; published in 1962)
Blasphemy? No, it is not blasphemy. If God is as
vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath
it.
-- Mark Twain, from
Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from
Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
The citizen who thinks he sees that the
commonwealth's political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does
not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.
-- Mark Twain, A
It is by the goodness of God that in our
country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech,
freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either.
-- Mark Twain, Following
the Equator, "Pudd'nhead
If the man doesn't believe as we do, we
say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now
we can't burn him.
-- Mark Twain, Following
the Equator
Between believing a thing and thinking
you know is only a small step and quickly taken.
-- Mark Twain, 3,000
Years Among the Microbes
Under certain circumstances, profanity
provides a relief denied even to prayer.
-- Mark Twain,
quoted from Curmudgeon-Online
Against a diseased imagination
demonstration goes for nothing.
-- Mark Twain,
"The Private History of a
Campaign that Failed," from Merry Tales (1892)
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.
-- Mark Twain,
"The Lowest Animal" (1897)
In God We Trust. It is the choicest
compliment that has ever been paid us, and the most gratifying to our feelings.
It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always sounds well -- In God We
Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.
-- Mark Twain (attributed:
source unknown)
Nevertheless we have this curious
spectacle: daily the trained parrot in the pulpit gravely delivers himself of
these ironies, which he has acquired at second-hand and adopted without
examination, to a trained congregation which accepts them without examination,
and neither the speaker nor the hearer laughs at himself. It does seem as if we
ought to be humble when we are at a bench-show, and not put on airs of
intellectual superiority there.
-- Mark Twain,
"Thoughts of God" (last paragraph) from Fables of Man, quoted
from John S Tuckey, ed., The Devil's Racetrack: Mark Twain's Dark
Writings (p. 22)
I bring you the stately matron named
Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched and dishonored from pirate raids
in Kiao-Chow,
-- Mark Twain,
"Christianity" A Salutation Speech from the Nineteenth Century to the
Twentieth,
"Thou shalt not commit
adultery" is a command which makes no distinction between the following
persons. They are all required to obey it:
Children at birth.
Children in the cradle.
School children.
Youths and maidens.
Fresh adults.
Older ones.
Men and women of 40.
Of 50.
Of 60.
Of 70.
Of 80.
Of 90.
Of 100.
The command does not distribute its burden equally,
and cannot.
It is not hard upon the three sets of children.
It is hard -- harder -- still harder upon the next
three sets -- cruelly hard.
It is blessedly softened to the next three sets.
It has now done all the damage it can, and might as
well be put out of commission. Yet with comical imbecility it is continued, and
the four remaining estates are put under its crushing ban. Poor old wrecks,
they couldn't disobey if they tried. And think -- because they holily refrain
from adulterating each other, they get praise for it! Which is nonsense; for
even the Bible knows enough to know that if the oldest veteran there could get
his lost heyday back again for an hour he would cast that commandment to the
winds and ruin the first woman he came across, even though she were an entire
stranger.
-- Mark Twain, Letters From the Earth (1909?; published in 1962)
It was not that Adam ate the apple for
the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for
us -- oh infinitely better for us -- if the serpent had been forbidden.
-- Mark Twain, Mark
Twain's Notebook
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 His 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, Notebook
To trust the God of the Bible is to
trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master; to
trust the true God is to trust a Being who has uttered no promises, but whose
beneficent, exact, and changeless ordering of the machinery of His colossal
universe is proof that He is at least steadfast to His purposes; whose
unwritten laws, so far as the affect man, being equal and impartial, show that
he is just and fair; these things, taken together, suggest that if he shall
ordain us to live hereafter, he will be steadfast, just and fair toward us. We
shall not need to require anything more.
-- Mark Twain, from
Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from
Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
The person who
wrote the advertisements is without doubt the most ignorant person now alive on
the planet, also without doubt he is an idiot, an
idiot of the 33rd degree and scion of an ancestral procession of idiots
stretching back to the Missing Link.... A few moments from now my resentment
will have faded and passed, and I shall probably even be praying for you; but
while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own
poison by mistake and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other
patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly
deserve.
-- Mark Twain, from
an unsent letter to a patent medicine company, as reported by radio host Dr. Dean Edell and corrected for Positive Atheism
(from memory) by Twain scholar and collector Robert Solatta (the original procession had become profession
and the original earned had become gamered, according to Solatta
who once posessed the original of this letter)
This is the only sane clerical the
earthquake has exposed to view yet.
-- Mark Twain, on
the margin of a newspaper report titled "God & the Earthquake; Rabbi
Says God Who Would Kill the Innocent isn't Worthy of Worship," about an
earthquake in
Surely the ass who invented the first
religion ought to be the first ass damned.
-- Mark Twain, on the
margin of a newspaper report titled "God & the Earthquake; Rabbi Says
God Who Would Kill The Innocent Isn't Worthy of
Worship," about an earthquake in
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.
-- Mark Twain,
letter to W D Howells (January 25, 1900), quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed.,
"Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
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.
-- Mark Twain,
Letter to Denver Post (August 14, 1902) regarding banning of The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Denver Library, also published in
the New York Tribune (August 22, 1902), quoted from Barbara Schmidt,
ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
The inventor of their heaven empties
into it all the nations of the earth, in one common jumble. All are on an
equality absolute, no one of them ranking another; they have to be
"brothers"; they have to mix together, pray together, harp together,
hosannah together -- whites, niggers, Jews, everybody -- there's no distinction.
Here in the earth all nations hate each other, and every one of them hates the
Jew. Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. He
really does. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks he thinks that if he
were only there he would take all the populace to his heart, and hug, and hug,
and hug!
-- Mark Twain, Letters From the Earth (1909?; published in 1962)
It is easy to see that the inventor of
the heaven did not originate the idea, but copied it from the show-ceremonies
of some sorry little sovereign State up in the back settlements of the Orient
somewhere.
-- Mark Twain, Letters From the Earth (1909?; published in 1962)
The choir always tittered and whispered
all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred,
but I have forgotten where it was.
-- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
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.
-- Mark Twain, in
margin of a copy of Richard Irving Dodge's Our Wild Indians, quoted from
Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
In all the ages, three-fourths of the
support of the great charities has been conscience money.
-- Mark Twain,
"A Humane Word from Satan" (1905)
Often the less there is to justify a
traditional custom the harder it is to get rid it.
-- Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Customs do not concern themselves with
right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around
them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly
forbidden.
-- Mark Twain, The
Custom is custom: it is built of brass,
boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments
have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon
-- Mark Twain, from
Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from
Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
Conformity -- the natural instinct to
passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
-- Mark Twain, Corn
Pone Opinions, quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
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.
-- Mark Twain, Corn
Pone Opinions, quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
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.
-- Mark Twain, note
on newspaper clipping of
One must keep one's character. Earn a
character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one. From the code of
morals I have been following and revising and revising for 72 years I remember
one detail. All my life I have been honest -- comparatively honest. I could
never use money I had not made honestly -- I could only lend it.
-- Mark Twain,
speech (December 22, 1907), quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
When one's character begins to fall
under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration
and destruction.
-- Mark Twain, from
Clara Clemens, My Father Mark Twain
There's one thing in this world which
isn't ever cheap. That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a
person don't ever try to jew you down on. That's a
coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person don't say -- "I'll
look around a little, and if I find I can't do better I'll come back and take
it." That's a coffin. There's one thing in this world which a person won't
take in pine if he can go walnut; and won't take in walnut if he can go
mahogany; and won't take in mahogany if he can go an iron casket with silver
door-plate and bronze handles. That's a coffin. And there's one thing in this
world which you don't have to worry around after a person to get him to pay
for. And that's a coffin. Undertaking? -- why it's the
dead-surest business in Christendom, and the nobbiest.
-- Mark Twain, Life
on the
James Ross Clemens, a cousin of mine was
seriously ill two or three weeks ago, in
-- Mark Twain, note
written in May, 1897, quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
... a
distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about
his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the
judgment of his friends on them. He should never leave such a thing to the last
hour of his life, and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to
enable him to say something smart with his latest gasp and launch into eternity
with grandeur.
-- Mark Twain,
"The Last Words of Great Men" (1869) quoted from Barbara Schmidt,
ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really
great and brave man.
-- Mark Twain,
letter to Olivia Clemens (July 1, 1885), referring to General Grant, quoted
from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations,
Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"
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, from
Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from
Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections,
& Related Resources"
I was dead for millions of years before
I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
-- Mark Twain (attributed:
source unknown)
After all these
years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; ... I should be
sorry to have that voice fall silent and pass out of my life.
-- Mark Twain, Adam's
Diary (1893)