The Philosophy of Mark Twain at Studio Not 2B

The Philosophy of Mark Twain

Mark Twain on maturity:
"When I was fourteen, my father was so old-fashioned and dimwitted I was embarrased to be around him. But by the time I turned twenty-one I was amazed at how much that man had learned."

Mark Twain on pet keeping:
Samuel Clemens loved cats. For animal companionship once while on vacation he rented two kittens, which he named Sack Cloth and Ashes.

On teenagers:
Mark Twain said that when we turn thirteen years old we should be put in a wooden barrel with the lid sealed and fed through the tap hole. And when we turn sixteen the tap hole should be closed also.

On fallibility:
"I have to respect a man who can spell a word more than one way."

On misplaced priority:
"Golf is a good walk spoiled."

On virtue and bravery:
"Be good and you will be lonesome."

On personal action (Reflections of Joan of Arc):
"Words will answer as long as it is only a person's neighbor who is in trouble, but when that person gets into trouble himself, it is time that the King rise up and do something."

On knowing whom to please:
"The ordinary run of newspaper criticism will not do to depend upon. Pay no attention to the papers, but watch the audience."

"Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principle one was that they escaped teething." (Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar)

"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's Notebook)

On the craft of writing:
"You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by." (Letter to Orion Clemens, 3/23/1878)

On simple clarity:
"I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice." (Letter to D. W. Bowser, 3/20/1880)

On Adversity:
"By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity - another man's I mean."

On advertising:
"Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."

Advice to school girls:
"Three things 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)

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."

On respectability:
"You ought never to sass old people - unless they sass you first." (Advice for Good Little Girls)

Advice to young people:
"It is wrong to put a sheepskin under your shirt when you know that you are going to get a licking. It is better to retire swiftly to a secret place and weep over your bad conduct until the storm blows over." (Advice for Good Little Boys)

"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)

On the afterlife:
"I am silent on the subject because of necessity. I have friends in both places." (quoted in Mark Twain, His Life and Work, Will Clemens)

"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)

On technology:
"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)

On animals:
"It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions." (What is Man?)

"Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it." (The Lowest Animal)

On answering:
"I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know." (Life on the Mississippi)

April Fool's 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)

On argument:
"Arguments have no chance against petrified training; they wear it as little as the waves wear a cliff." (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

"Women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women." (Experience of the McWilliamses)

On aristocracy:
"Any kind of royalty, however modified, any kind of aristocracy, however pruned, is rightly an insult." (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

"We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy or we cannot be content. In America ... we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter." (Eruption)

"We like to read about rich people in the papers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed." (Eruption)

On comparison to the jackass:
"Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass." (Notebook, 1898)

"It is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and not kick."

On babies:
"A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother." (Letter to Annie Webster, 1876)

The banker:
"A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain." (possibly Mark Twain but unauthenticated.)

On beliefs:
"If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. It mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him." (Following the Equator)

"Between believing a thing and thinking you know is only a small step and quickly taken." (3,000 Years Among the Microbes)

On the bicycle:
"Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live." (Taming the Bicycle)

On birth and death:
"Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved." (Pudd'nhead Wilson)

On blushing:
"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." (Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar)

On boasting:
"War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull." (Life on the Mississippi)

"Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid." (Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar)

On boldness:
"The timid man yearns for full value and demands a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par." (Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar)

On books:
"A classic is a book which people praise and don't read." (Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar)

"You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination." (A Fable)

"When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved." (The Prince and the Pauper)

"The index of a book should always be written by the author, even though the book itself should be the work of another hand." (attributed by Robert Underwood Johnson, Remembered Yesterdays)

"Great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammer." (Biography)

"A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it." (Letter to H. H. Rogers, May 1897)

On brotherhood:
"The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession - what there is of it." (Mark Twain's Notebook)

On business:
"There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can." (Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar)

Let your sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight - this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one - this is business." (Mark Twain, a Biography)

"Prosperity is the best protector of principle." (Following the Equator)

"The primary rule of business success is loyalty to your employer. That's all right - as a theory. What is the matter with loyalty to yourself?" (Speech, 3/30/1901)

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)

"We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain." (Speech, July 4, 1873)

Calamity:
"The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for." (Letter to Olivia Clemens, 8/16/1896)

Cats:
"... the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!" (Tom Sawyer Abroad)

"A home without a cat - and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat - may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title?" (Pudd'nhead Wilson)

"You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does - but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use." (A Tramp Abroad)

"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 lash. 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)

"By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward - you will never get her full confidence again." (Mark Twain, a Biography)

"I simply can't resist a cat, particularly a purring one. They are the cleanest, cunningest, and most intelligent things I know, outside of the girl you love, of course." (Abroad with Mark Twain and Eugene Field, Fisher)

On change:
"Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with." (Roughing It)

Cheerfulness:
"The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up." (Mark Twain's Notebook)

"A healthy and wholeseome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation." (The Undertaker's Chat)

Children:
"The most useful and interesting letters we get here from home are from children seven or eight years old. This is petrified truth. Happily they have got nothing to talk about but home, and neighbours and family - things their betters think unworthy of transmission thousands of miles. They write simply and naturally, and without straining for effect. They tell all they know, and then stop." (An Open Letter to the American People, New York Weekly Review, 2/17/1866)

"Familiarity breeds contempt - and children." (Notebook, 1894)

"The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it." (Autobiography)

"Children have but little charity for one another's defects." (Autobiography)

"... what are they in the world for I don't know, for they are of no practical value as far as I can see. If I could beget a typewriter - but no, our fertile days are over." (Letter to W. D. Howells, 5/12/1899)

Christians:
"There has been only one Christian. They caught him and crucified him - early." (Notebook, 1898)

"The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve." (Mark Twain, a Biography)

The 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)

"I've been to the circus three or four times - lots of times. Church ain't a circumstance to a circus." (Tom Sawyer: A Play)

Citizenship:
"Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it." (Speech 3/4/1906)

The Civil War:
"In the South the war is what AD is elsewhere; they date from it." (Life on the Mississippi)

"Our Civil War was a blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls." (quoted by Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch in letter to New York Herald Tribune, November 19, 1941)

Civilization:
"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)

In God We Trust:
"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)

Comedy:
"Comedy keeps the heart sweet." (About Play-Acting)

Compliments:
"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)

"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." (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)

"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)

"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)

"A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment." (Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar)

"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." (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)

Conscience:
"An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth." (Notebook, 1904)

"It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good nohow." (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)

"If you grant that one man's conscience doesn't know right from wrong, it is an admission that there are others like it. This single admissions pulls down the whole doctrine of infallibility of judgment in consciences." (What is Man?)

"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?)

"It seems to me that a man should secure the well done, faithful servant, of his own conscience first and foremost, and let all other loyalties go." (Consistency speech, 1887)

"Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life." (Mark Twain's Notebook; also in More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927)

"All the consciences I have ever heard of were nagging, badgering, fault-finding, execrable savages! Yes; and always in a sweat about some poor little insigificant trifle or other - destruction catch the lot of them, I say! I would trade mine for the small-pox and seven kinds of consumption, and be glad of the chance." (The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut)

"Conscience, man's moral medicine chest." (Mark Twain's Autobiography)

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)

Consistency:
"There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue; and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice." (Consistency speech, 1887)

Conspicuousness:
"Was it my conspicuousness that distressed me? Not at all. It was merely that I was not beautifully conspicuous but uglily conspicuous - it makes all the difference in the world." (Eruption)

Conspiracy:
"The wronger a conspiracy is, the better it is." (Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy)

Consultant:
"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)

Conversation:
"He had a good memory, and a tongue tied in the middle. This a combination which gives immortality to conversation." (Roughing It)

Convictions:
"The longer I live, the clearer I perceive how unmatchable, how unapproachable a compliment one pays when he says of a man, 'He has the courage to utter his convictions.' Haven't you had reviewers talk Alps to you, and then print potato hills?" (Letter to W. D. Howells, 2/15/1887)

Convinving:
"... his answers were so final and exact that he did not leave a doubt to hang conversation on." (Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion)

"... when a man is known to have no settled convictions of his own he can't convict other people." (unsent letter to Orion Clemens, 2/9/1879)

Courage:
"Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. Except a creature be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave; it is merely a loose misapplication of the word." (Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar)

"It is curious - curious that physical courage should be so common in the world, and moral courage so rare." (Mark Twain in Eruption)

Courtesy:
"What is courtesy? Consideration for others. Is there a good deal of it in the American character? So far as I have observed, no. Is it an American characteristic? So far as I have observed, the most prominent, the most American of all American characteristics, is the poverty of it in the American character." (Doctor Van Dyke speech, 1906)

Courtship:
"Courtship lifts a young fellow far and away above his common earthly self and by an impulse natural to those lofty regions he puts on his halo and his heavenly war paint and plays archangel as if he were born to it. He is working a deception, but is not aware of it." (Which Was the Dream)

Covetousness:
"There is no such thing as material covetousness. All covetousness is spiritual. Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment." (What Is Man?)

Cowardice:
"There are several good protections against temptation, but the surest is cowardice." (Following the Equator)

"We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles." (More Maxims of Mark, Johnson)

"You are a coward when you even seem to have backed down from a thing you openly set out to do." (Mark Twain's Notebook)

Creation:
"Where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days? It is likely that if more time had been taken in the first place, the world would have been made right, and this ceaseless improving and repairing would not be necessary now. But if you hurry a world or a house, you are nearly sure to find out by and by that you have left out a towhead, or a broom-closet, or some other little convenience, here and there, which has got to be supplied, no matter how much expense or vexation it may cost." (Life on the Mississippi)

"Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired." (Mark Twain's Notebook)

Credit:
"Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society. Who shall say that this is not the golden age of mutual trust, of unlimited reliance upon human promises? That is a peculiar condition of society which enables a whole nation to instantly recognize point and meaning in the familiar newspaper anecdote, which puts into the mouth of a distinguished speculator in lands and mines this remark: 'I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars.' " (The Gilded Age)

Cremation:
"As for me, I hope to be cremated. I made that remark to my pastor once, who said, with what he seemed to think was an impressive manner: 'I wouldn't worry about that, if I had your chances.' Much he knew about it - the family all so opposed to it." (Life on the Mississippi)

Crime:
"Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth." (More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927)

Ctriticism:
"I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it." (Mental Telegraphy")

"... one mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself." (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

"A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt." (Mark Twain on England, New York World N.D.; reprinted in Hartford Courant, 5/14/1879)

"I like criticism, but it must be my way." (Mark Twain's Autobiography)

Cruelty:
"Of all the creatures that were made, man is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one - the solitary one - that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices - the most hateful. He is the only creature that has pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. Also, in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind." (Mark Twain's Autobiography)

Custom:
"Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else; this is not advice, it is merely custom." (Notebook, 1898)

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

"Custom is petrification; nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century." (Diplomatic Pay and Clothes)

"There isn't anything you can't stand, if you are only born and bred to it." (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court)

"Often the less there is to justify a traditional custom the harder it is to get rid it." (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)

"Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. The penalty may be unfair, unrighteous, illogical, and a cruelty; no matter, it will be inflicted, just the same. Certainly, then, there can be but one wise thing for a visiting stranger to do - find out what the country's customs are, and refrain from offending against them." (The Gorky Incident)

"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 Gibraltar." (Mark Twain, a Biography)

"Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason." (The Gorky Incident)

"A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law." (Following the Equator)

From the book: I can Think This Stuff Up, so Why Can't I Find my Pipe?

| Back to the Lobby | The Reception Desk | More from Studio Not 2B |

Studio Not 2B at RadioWCPR.com, Coudersport Public Radio

Studio Not 2B
at RadioWCPR.com

Choose your best friend wisely, and you'll have a rodent-free home.
... unknown