Mark Twain Trail Quote of the Day – Wednesday – March 31, 2021
“When you’re mad, count four; when you’re very mad, swear! But most of us don’t wait to count four! at least I don’t!” Mark Twain
"To Wander, To Learn, To Dream, To Build"
“When you’re mad, count four; when you’re very mad, swear! But most of us don’t wait to count four! at least I don’t!” Mark Twain
“The most useful and interesting letters we get here from home are from children seven or eight years old…They write simply and naturally and without straining for effect. They tell all they know, and stop.” Mark Twain, An Open Letter to the American People, New York Weekly Review, February 17, 1866
“A full belly is of little worth where the mind is starved, and the heart.” The Prince and the Pauper, 1881
“Before the day of the Church’s supremacy in the world, men were men, and held their heads up, and had a man’s pride and spirit and independence; and what of greatness and position a person got, he got mainly by achievement, not by birth.” Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 1889
“There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable.” Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebook
“Mark Twain, though he did not go for spiritualism or immortality, would have agreed that siblings could tune into each other from opposite sides of the ocean. He believed, he once wrote, that a mind “still inhabiting the flesh” could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as “the oddest thing that ever happened to me.”
The mail had just come at Twain’s home in Hartford, and he held a fat letter, still sealed. “Now I will do a miracle,” he drawled. He recognized the hand of someone from whom he said he hadn’t heard in eleven years. Even so, he knew without opening it that the letter contained a book idea. Their minds had been “in close and crystal-clear communication with each other across three thousand miles of mountain and desert on the morning of the 2nd of March.” Twain, in effect, had sat down to write to this very contact, on the same day, about this very same idea. Twain answered: “Dear Dan—Wonders never will cease.””
Chantel Tarroli, Mark Twain’s Mind Waves, The Paris Review
“One gets large impressions in boyhood, sometimes, which he has to fight against all his life.” Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, 1869
“Always avoid violence; in this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined.” Mark Twain, Advice to Youth, May 15, 1882
“Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.” Mark Twain, Following the Equator, 1897
“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.” Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883