Samuel Clemens Quotes

A few fly bites cannot stop a spirited horse.

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. . . . The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. . . . When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be -- a Christian. Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist

I'll miss you most of all scarecrow.

If my name were Mark Twain, I’d write under the pseudonym “Samuel Clemens.

This is Huck Finn, a child of mine of shady reputation. Be good to him for his parent's sake.

No one saves an e-mail, because it's so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general. All the great love letters - from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife, Olivia - I don't know, I always think about what will be lost -

A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. Samuel Clemens "Mark Twain", American author and humorist

Consider well the proportion of things: it is better to be a young June bug than an old bird of paradise.

Samuel Clemens put it: "Where she was, there was Eden." Omar phrased it: "-thou beside me in the wilderness, ah wilderness were paradise enow." Browning termed it "Summum Bonum." All were asserting the same great truth, which is for me: Heaven is where Margrethe is.

It is better for a man to remain silent and appear a fool, then to open his mouth and remove all doubt.

Some people scorn a cat and think it not an essential; but the Clemens tribe are not of these.

Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat.

We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas. The church-bell began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued to ring I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation through his head.

The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow, is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven's gates had swung open and exposed the throne. (Twain on seeing the Jungfrau.)

Supposing is good, finding out is better.

He did not mention that he was a lineal descendant of Balaam's ass; but every body knew that without his telling it.

The report of my death was an exaggeration.

Mark Twain. Samuel Clemens has been quoted as saying he thought the Book of Mormon was "chloroform in print". For

An injurious lie is an uncommendable thing and so, also, and in the same degree, is an injurious truth--a fact that is recognized by the law of libel. Among other common lies we have the silent lie – the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth.

Consider the great Samuel Clemens. Huckleberry Finn is one of the few books that all American children are mandated to read: Jonathan Arac, in his brilliant new study of the teaching of Huck, is quite right to term it 'hyper-canonical.' And Twain is a figure in American history as well as in American letters. The only objectors to his presence in the schoolroom are mediocre or fanatical racial nationalists or 'inclusivists,' like Julius Lester or the Chicago-based Dr John Wallace, who object to Twain's use—in or out of 'context'—of the expression 'nigger.' An empty and formal 'debate' on this has dragged on for decades and flares up every now and again to bore us. But what if Twain were taught as a whole? He served briefly as a Confederate soldier, and wrote a hilarious and melancholy account, The Private History of a Campaign That Failed. He went on to make a fortune by publishing the memoirs of Ulysses Grant. He composed a caustic and brilliant report on the treatment of the Congolese by King Leopold of the Belgians. With William Dean Howells he led the Anti-Imperialist League, to oppose McKinley's and Roosevelt's pious and sanguinary war in the Philippines. Some of the pamphlets he wrote for the league can be set alongside those of Swift and Defoe for their sheer polemical artistry. In 1900 he had a public exchange with Winston Churchill in New York City, in which he attacked American support for the British war in South Africa and British support for the American war in Cuba. Does this count as history? Just try and find any reference to it, not just in textbooks but in more general histories and biographies. The Anti-Imperialist League has gone down the Orwellian memory hole, taking with it a great swirl of truly American passion and intellect, and the grand figure of Twain has become reduced—in part because he upended the vials of ridicule over the national tendency to religious and spiritual quackery, where he discerned what Tocqueville had missed and far anticipated Mencken—to that of a drawling, avuncular fabulist.

No one saves an e-mail, because it’s so inherently impersonal. I worry about posterity in general. All the great love letters – from Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre, from Samuel Clemens to his wife, Olivia – I don’t know, I always think about what will be lost—

The privilege of the grave: Its occupant has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person: free speech.

The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say.

You're never wrong to do the right thing

But, don't you know, there are some things that can beat smartness and foresight? Awkwardness and stupidity can. The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn’t do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn’t prepared for him.

It makes a body ooze sarcasm at every pore, to go about Rome and Florence and see what this last generation has been doing with the statues. These works, which had stood in innocent nakedness for ages, are all figleaved now. Yes, every one of them. Nobody noticed their nakedness before, perhaps; nobody can help noticing it now, the figleaf makes it so conspicuous. (Quoting Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens)

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty of these false starts—manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes and chapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries. To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placed them early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed. None dealt with more than brief snatches of his life story.

But isn't this relic matter a little overdone? We find a piece of the true cross in every old church we go into, and some of the nails that held it together. I would not like to be positive, but I think we have seen as much as a keg of these nails. Then there is the crown of thorns; they have part of one in Sainte Chapelle, in Paris, and part of one, also, in Notre Dame. And as for bones of St. Denis, I feel certain we have seen enough of them to duplicate him, if necessary.

I state as my simple deduction from the things I have seen and the things I have heard, that the Holy Personages rank thus in Rome: First - "The Mother of God" - otherwise the Virgin Mary Second - The Deity Third - Peter Fourth - Some twelve or fifteen canonised Popes and martyrs Fifth - Jesus Christ the Saviour - (but always as an infant in arms.)

But perhaps the most poetical thing Pompeii has yielded to modern research, was that grand figure of a Roman solider, clad in complete armour; who, true to his duty, true to his proud name of a soldier of Rome, and full of the stern courage which had given to that name its glory, stood to his post by the city gate, erect and unflinching, till the hell that raged around him burned out the dauntless spirit it could not conquer.

Few authors have captivated the American penchant for curiosity like Samuel Longhorne Clemens. Many have called his cantankerous alter ego, Mark Twain, the greatest American humorist-philosopher of his age-if not of all times. With his wry observations and forthright humor-unleashed in his particularly pithy paragraphs-Mark Twain became one of the most prolific satirists in American literature. The New York Times editorial, reporting of his death on April 22, 1910, said. “ He has been quoted in common conversation oftener, perhaps, than any of his fellow-countrymen, including Benjamin Franklin and Lincoln. In 1909, Mark Twain is quoted as saying, “ I came in with Haley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Haley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.” His prediction was accurate-Mark Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, one day after the comet's closest approach to earth. In Mark Twain's Guide to Audacious Sarcasm-volume 1, Lowell Smith has assembled twenty of the classic cantankerous tales and wry observations of Mark Twain’s celestial career.

Do you know who Samuel Langhorne Clemens is, Antonio?” Bessie asked. “No, chood I?” he said. “He is best known as Mark Twain, the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” she said. “I have herd of the story, but I hav not red the booc,” he said. “Well, you should read it,” she said. “It is excellent reading. An American classic. Mark Twain worked in Schoharie for a while,” she said. “Is that so?” he said. “Yes, he worked as a brakeman on the Schoharie railroad station on Depot Street the winter of 1879, three years after he wrote his famous book,” Bessie said. “Why would he do that, a famos author?” Antonio asked. “A self-published author, I should add.

This is something Mark Twain, or Samuel Clemens wrote, or whatever: "To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.

Mark Twain, the beloved author who gave voice to the unique place that was and is the United States, was also Samuel Clemens.

Can we ever really know to what extent this man [Mark Twain] or his book [Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] was, or is, racist? When we identify racism in the book, aren't we really just identifying racism in the culture out of which it came? Is it fair to expect Twain to have vaulted himself out of his own time and place and arrive, clean-booted and upright, in our own? Isn't the book still funny and deep? Aren't I actually enjoying it? How does one do the complicated math of Ultimate Racism: If we determine that, relative to our own time, Twain was a 40 percent racist, while relative to his own, he was only a 12 percent racist, or was in fact a 0 percent racist--what do we know, really?

Samuel Clemens, who used the celebrated pen name Mark Twain and was the author of such nineteenth-century classics as Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, had many telepathic experiences. He dubbed them “mental telegraphy” because the telegraph was the fanciest long-distance communication technology in his day. Twain was concerned about his reputation as a serious author if he reported his experiences, so for years he kept quietly adding his experiences to an unpublished manuscript. Finally, after British scientists began to show serious interest in this topic in 1882 with the formation of the Society for Psychical Research, Twain decided to publish an article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1891. It began: Note to the Editor.—By glancing over the enclosed bundle of rusty old manuscript, you will perceive that I once made a great discovery: the discovery that certain sorts of thing which, from the beginning of the world, had always been regarded as merely “curious coincidences”—that is to say, accidents—were no more accidental than is the sending and receiving of a telegram an accident. I made this discovery sixteen or seventeen years ago, and gave it a name—“Mental Telegraphy.” It is the same thing around the outer edges of which the Psychical Society of England began to group (and play with) four or five years ago, and which they named “Telepathy.” Within the last two or three years they have penetrated toward the heart of the matter, however, and have found out that mind can act upon mind in a quite detailed and elaborate way over vast stretches of land and water. And they have succeeded in doing, by their great credit and influence, what I could never have done—they have convinced the world that mental telegraphy is not a jest, but a fact, and that it is a thing not rare, but exceedingly common. They have done our age a service—and a very great service, I think.238

You have great ability; I believe you have genius. What you need now is the refinement of association.

If I had created the human race I'd sit in the corner with a bag over my head.

The true name of Mark Twain was Samuel Langhorne Clemens.