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::'''''[[Pudd'nhead Wilson]]'''''
::'''''[[The Prince and the Pauper]]'''''
::'''''[[A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court]]'''''
::'''''[[The Adventures of Tom Sawyer]]'''''
::'''''[[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]'''''
::'''''[[Following the Equator]]'''''
== Quotes ==
[[File:Darkness Over Eden 2709.jpg |thumb|right|Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.]]
* I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever.
*
** "Answers to Correspondents", ''[[w:The Californian (1860s newspaper)|The Californian]]'', 17 June 1865.<!--ref ''Early Tales & Sketches, v.2, 1864-1865'', Branch and Hirst, ed. (1981) http://books.google.com/books?id=oK3HrsDGYmUC&pg=PA187 --> Anthologized in ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=kqMDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA35 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches]'' (1867)
* I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.
** "[[w: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 ''[[w:New York Saturday Press|New York Saturday Press]]'', 18 November 1865; revised by the author and reprinted the following month in ''[[w:The Californian (1860s newspaper)|The Californian]]''; first anthologized in ''[http://books.google.com/books?id=kqMDAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA17 The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches]'' (1867), ed. John Paul
* I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.
* Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.
** As quoted in [httphttps://web.archive.org/web/20181106220834/https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kipling/rudyard/seatosea/chapter37.html "An Interview with Mark Twain"], ''From Sea to Sea: Letters of Travel'' (1899) by [[Rudyard Kipling]], Ch. 37, p. 180<!-- Doubleday & McClure Company. -->
** Commonly paraphrased as: "First get your facts, then you can distort them at your leisure."
=== ''[[w:Adventures of Huckleberry Finn|Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]]'' (1885) ===
{{Main|Adventures of Huckleberry Finn}}
* Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.<br>BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.
** Notice
* You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
** Ch. 1
* Jim was most ruined for a servant, because he got stuck up on account of having seen the devil and been rode by witches.
** Ch. 2
* We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed, only a little kind of a low chuckle. We had mighty good weather as a general thing, and nothing ever happened to us at all, that night, nor the next, nor the next.
** Ch. 12
* Well, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.
** Ch. 16
* ''Pilgrim's Progress'', about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough.
** Ch. 17
* There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.
** Ch. 18
* We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.
** Ch. 18
* To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin.
** Ch. 21
* Everybody yelled at him, and laughed at him, and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now, because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on."
** Ch. 21
** Ch. 26
* I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, "All right, then, I'll GO''go'' to hell."
** Ch. 31
* So there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and aint't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.
** Ch. 43
=== ''[[w:A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court|A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court]]'' (1889) ===
{{Main|A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court}}
:<small>[http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/86 Full text online at Project Gutenberg] </small>
[[File:Connecticut Yankee4 new.jpg|thumb|You can't depend on your eyes when your [[imagination]] is out of focus.]]
*Why, it was like reading about France and the French, before the ever memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villany away in one swift tidal-wave of blood -- one: a settlement of that hoary debt in the proportion of half a drop of blood for each hogshead of it that had been pressed by slow tortures out of that people in the weary stretch of ten centuries of wrong and shame and misery the like of which was not to be mated but in hell. There were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror -- that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
** [http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-13.html Ch. 13]
* 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. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, to die for rags—that is a loyalty of unreason, it is pure animal; it belongs to monarchy, was invented by monarchy; let monarchy keep it. I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares "that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient." <br /> Under that gospel, 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. That he may be the only one who thinks he sees this decay, does not excuse him; it is his duty to agitate anyway, and it is the duty of the others to vote him down if they do not see the matter as he does. <br /> And now here I was, in a country where a right to say how the country should be governed was restricted to six persons in each thousand of its population. For the nine hundred and ninety-four to express dissatisfaction with the regnant system and propose to change it, would have made the whole six shudder as one man, it would have been so disloyal, so dishonorable, such putrid black treason. So to speak, I was become a stockholder in a corporation where nine hundred and ninety-four of the members furnished all the money and did all the work, and the other six elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends. It seemed to me that what the nine hundred and ninety-four dupes needed was a new deal. <!-- The thing that would have best suited the circus side of my nature would have been to resign the Boss-ship and get up an insurrection and turn it into a revolution; but I knew that the Jack Cade or the Wat Tyler who tries such a thing without first educating his materials up to revolution grade is almost absolutely certain to get left. I had never been accustomed to getting left, even if I do say it myself. -->
** Ch. 13
* The pilgrims were human beings. Otherwise they would have acted differently. They had come a long and difficult journey, and now when the journey was nearly finished, and they learned that the main thing they had come for had ceased to exist, they didn't do as horses or cats or angle-worms would probably have done — turn back and get at something profitable — no, anxious as they had before been to see the miraculous fountain, they were as much as forty times as anxious now to see the place where it had used to be. There is no accounting for human beings.
** [http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-22.html Ch. 22]
* Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.
* Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
** Ch. 22
* It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred, and so, not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren of the knowledge.
** [http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-25.html Ch 25]
* You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
** Ch. 43
** [http://www.literature.org/authors/twain-mark/connecticut/chapter-43.html Ch. 43]
=== ''How To Tell A Story'' (1895) ===
=== ''[[w:Following the Equator|Following the Equator]]'' (1897) ===
{{Main|Following the Equator}}
* 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.
** The Pudd'nhead Maxims, preface
* She had run down and down and down, and had at last reached a point where medicines no longer had any helpful effect upon her. I said I knew I could put her upon her feet in a week. It brightened her up, it filled her with hope, and she said she would do everything I told her to do. So I said she must stop swearing and drinking, and smoking and eating for four days, and then she would be all right again. And it would have happened just so, I know it; but she said she could not stop swearing, and smoking, and drinking, because she had never done those things. So there it was. She had neglected her habits, and hadn't any. Now that they would have come good, there were none in stock. She had nothing to fall back on. She was a sinking vessel, with no freight in her to throw overboard and lighten ship withal.
** Ch. I
* When in doubt, tell the truth.
** Pudd'nheadCh. Wilson's2, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, Ch. II
** Not in the text, but added by many sources is the sentence: "It will confound your enemies and astound your friends." Compare this line to the advice attributed to [[Henry Wotton]] (1568 - 1639) to a young diplomat "to tell the truth, and so puzzle and confound his enemies." ''E.g.'', Vol 24, Encyclopedia Britannica of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature, [https://books.google.com/books?id=_GlJAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA721&lpg=PA721&dq=truth+wotton+confound+advice&source=bl&ots=-cGk3UDLLj&sig=ltOR1xtI9WFic1JWKiFmIZ8Yce0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjVkZCsj-jRAhXCyFQKHTmsCkAQ6AEIODAG#v=onepage&q=truth%20wotton%20confound%20advice&f=false page 721] (9th Ed. 1894)
* Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
** Ch. 38, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. II ; as cited in [https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/0486473198 ''Mark Twain at your Fingertips'']: A Book of Quotations, ed. Caroline Thomas Hornsberger, Courier Corp. (2009), p. 385
* It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. III
* Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. V
* '''Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.'''
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. VII
* 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, Ch. VIII
* There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XII
* Truth is stranger than fiction — to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
* Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XV
*** Misquoted as "Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense." by Laurence J. Peter in "Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time", among many others.
* 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 of them.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XX
* Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXI
* "Classic." A book which people praise and don't read.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXV
* Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXVII
[[File:Urubu a tete rouge - Turkey Vulture.jpg|right|thumb|A [[w:Turkey vulture|turkey vulture]]]]
* A [[vulture]] on board ; bald, red, queer-shaped head, featherless red places here and there on his body, intense great black eyes set in featherless rims of inflamed flesh ; dissipated look ; a business-like style, a selfish, conscienceless, murderous aspect — '''the very look of a professional [[assassin]], and yet a bird which does no [[murder]].''' What was the use of getting him up in that tragic style for so innocent a trade as his ? For this one isn't the sort that wars upon the living, his diet is offal — and the more out of date it is the better he likes it. Nature should give him a suit of rusty black ; then he would be all right, for he would look like an undertaker and would harmonize with his business ; whereas the way he is now he is horribly out of true.
** Ch. XXXVII
* By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XXXIX
* Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.
** Ch. XLI
* Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XLVIII
* 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.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. XLIX
* It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination marvelous to our kind of people, the cold whites.
** referencing the [[w:Kumbh Mela|Kumbh Mela]], Ch. XLIX
*Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LIX
* Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LIX
* In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LXI
* Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist but you have ceased to live.
**Ch. LXII
* Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.
** Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, Ch. LXVI
==== Quotes about [[India]] ====
* '''This is indeed India!''' the land of dreams and romance, of fabulous wealth and fabulous poverty, of splendor and rags, of palaces and hovels, of famine and pestilence, of genii and giants and Aladdin lamps, of tigers and elephants, the cobra and the jungle, the country of a hundred nations and a hundred tongues, of a thousand religions and two million gods, cradle of the human race, birthplace of human speech, mother of history, grandmother of legend, great-grandmother of tradition, whose yesterdays bear date with the mouldering antiquities of the rest of the nations — the one sole country under the sun that is endowed with an imperishable interest for alien prince and alien peasant, for lettered and ignorant, wise and fool, rich and poor, bond and free, the one land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. '''Even now, after the lapse of a year, the delirium of those days in Bombay has not left me, and I hope never will.'''
** [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5811/5811-h/5811-h.htm Ch. XXXVIII]
* [[Famine in India|Famine]] is India's specialty. Elsewhere [[Famine|famines]] are inconsequential incidents — in India they are devastating cataclysms; in one case they annihilate hundreds; in the other, millions. <br> '''India has 2,000,000 gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only [[millionaire]].''' <br> With her everything is on a giant scale — even her poverty; no other country can show anything to compare with it. And she has been used to wealth on so vast a scale that she has to shorten to single words the expressions describing great sums.
** [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/p5.htm Ch. XLIII]
* India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil. It would seem as if she should have kept the lead, and should be to-day not the meek dependent of an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and command to every tribe and nation in it. But, in truth, there was never any possibility of such supremacy for her.
** Ch. XLIII
* '''So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or Nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his round. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.''' Always, when you think you have come to the end of her tremendous specialties and have finished hanging tags upon her as the Land of the Thug, the Land of the Plague, the Land of Famine, the Land of Giant Illusions, the Land of Stupendous Mountains, and so forth, another specialty crops up and another tag is required. I have been overlooking the fact that India is by an unapproachable supremacy — the Land of Murderous Wild Creatures. '''Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize her with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of Wonders.'''
** [http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2895/2895-h/p6.htm Ch. LVII]
=== "Which was the Dream?" (1898) ===
** A precursor is found in the December 1859 edition of ''[https://books.google.com/books?id=gpdEAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA209&dq=The+lack+of+money+is+the+root+of+all+evil&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjWi5DE1crLAhUI3mMKHeSdB0YQ6AEINTAD#v=onepage&q=%22lack%20of%20gold%22&f=false Household Monthly]'': "It is very well to repeat, parrot-like, the old axiom that 'the love of gold is the root of all evil;' but it is very certain that in truth—the ''lack'' of gold is the great incentive to crime."
* '''It's not the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.'''
** [[Anonymous]] American proverb; since 1998 this has often been attributed to Mark Twain on the internet, but no contemporary evidence of him ever using it has been located.
** Variants:
** "Twain probably never uttered [these] words," according to R. Kent Rasmussen, editor of ''The Quotable Mark Twain'' (1998).
** "To play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk" is found in H.S. Scrivener, [https://books.google.com/books?id=cYgCAAAAYAAJ&q=dicta#v=snippet&q=dicta&f=false "Memories of Men and Meetings"], in Arthur Wallis Myers (ed.) ''Lawn Tennis at Home and Abroad'' New York:Charles Scribner's Sons, 1903, p. 47. Scrivener attributes the aphorism to "my good friends the Allens". Reference from [http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/28/golf-good-walk Quote Investigator].
* If voting made any difference, they wouldn't let us do it.
* ''Variant'': If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.
** Not by Twain, but from [[w:Philip Berrigan|Philip Berrigan]] and [[w:Emma Goldman|Emma Goldman]].<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-twain-voting-quote/|title='If Voting Made a Difference, They Wouldn't Let Us Do It'|website=[[w:Snopes|Snopes]]|author=Dan Evon |date=May 24, 2016 |access-date=April 14, 2024}}</ref>
* I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
*{{commonscat-inline}}
* {{gutenberg author|id=Mark_Twain|name=Mark Twain}}
== Notes ==
{{Reflist}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Twain, Mark}}
[[Category:People from California]]
[[Category:Journalists from the United States]]
[[Category:AmericanPublishers publishersfrom the United States]]
[[Category:Critics from the United States]]
[[Category:Abolitionists]]
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