Mark Twain Quotes, Checked Against His Books

Mark Twain quotes are the most counterfeited in American letters, so every line below was found in a full text of one of his books and is cited to the chapter. There are fourteen, from Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Pudd’nhead Wilson and three travel books. At the end are three famous “Twain quotes” that we could not find in any of them.

The real ones are odder than the fakes. Fake Twain gives advice. Real Twain mostly makes fun of the people who give it.

Mark Twain quotes from Huckleberry Finn

1. The warning on the first page

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.

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Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “Notice”, before chapter I

It is signed BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, by a chief of ordnance. It is a joke, and also a dare: the book that follows is one of the most moral novels in American literature, and Twain knew critics would come looking for the moral with a magnifying glass.

2. Huck introduces himself

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.

Huck, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter I

The narrator reviews his own author in the first sentence and gives him a mixed notice. “Mainly” is the word to watch. Huck goes on to say there were things Twain stretched, and that he never met anybody who didn’t lie one time or another. The whole novel is told in a voice that has just admitted it cannot be fully trusted.

3. No home like a raft

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.

Huck, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter XVIII

Context makes this one hurt. Huck has just escaped the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud, after watching Buck Grangerford, a boy about his own age, shot in the river, and Jim has been hiding in the swamp. Corn-dodgers and buttermilk, a signal lantern, the middle of the Mississippi: safety is a few square feet of logs, shared by two people the shore would not let live together.

4. The king’s arithmetic

Cuss the doctor! What do we k’yer for him? Hain’t we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain’t that a big enough majority in any town?

The king, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter XXVI

The two con men are posing as the dead Peter Wilks’s brothers from England to swindle his three orphaned nieces, and the town doctor is the only one who has seen through them. The duke wants to run. The king wants to stay and sell the house. His political theory gets a laugh, and it is not really a joke.

5. After the tar and feathers

Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn’t ever feel any hardness against them any more in the world. It was a dreadful thing to see. Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

Huck, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter XXXIII

The same king and duke are carried past on a rail, tarred and feathered, by a mob with torches and tin pans. They sold Jim. They deserve it. Huck pities them anyway, which is the most grown-up thing anyone does in the book. Huck’s great moral decision about Jim, in chapter XXXI, is on our page of book quotes about friendship.

Tom Sawyer and the great law of human action

6. The fence

He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.

Narrator, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, chapter II

Tom has just tricked the neighbourhood boys into paying him for the privilege of whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. The narrator then promotes the scam to philosophy and adds a definition worth keeping: Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

Many of the quotable lines in the 1894 novel are not in the story at all. Each chapter opens with an entry from the calendar kept by David Wilson, the lawyer the town dismissed as a “pudd’nhead”. They are epigrams by a fictional crank, which gave Twain cover to say anything.

7. Adam and the serpent

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

Pudd’nhead Wilson, epigraph to chapter II

This is Tom Sawyer’s fence again, applied to Genesis. Twain returned to Adam and Eve constantly; the calendar mentions them at the head of chapters II, III and IV alone.

8. The undertaker

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Pudd’nhead Wilson, epigraph to chapter VI

It starts in the voice of a sermon and ends with a professional who is paid to be sorry. The entry right after it is gentler and more useful: habit is not to be flung out of the window, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time.

9. Watch that basket

Behold, the fool saith, “Put not all thine eggs in the one basket”—which is but a manner of saying, “Scatter your money and your attention;” but the wise man saith, “Put all your eggs in the one basket and—watch that basket”

Pudd’nhead Wilson, epigraph to chapter XV

Proverbs, reversed. The fake-scriptural “saith” is part of the gag. It heads the chapter called “The Robber Robbed”, which is fair warning about what is going to happen to somebody’s basket.

10. A good example

Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.

Pudd’nhead Wilson, epigraph to chapter XIX

Short, and true of every office. Directly beneath it in chapter XIX sits another entry that sounds like an inspirational poster until the last word: it is difference of opinion that makes horse-races.

Twain quotes from the travel books

11. Travel and prejudice

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, “Conclusion”

The first half is on luggage tags. The second half, the dig at “our people”, is usually cut. Twain had just spent hundreds of pages mocking his fellow American passengers on a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land, and the book’s last chapter is his verdict on them.

12. Science

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, chapter 17

The chapter is about cut-offs, the places where the river slices through a neck of land and shortens itself. Twain extrapolates the measurements forward until the Lower Mississippi is a mile and three-quarters long and Cairo and New Orleans share one mayor. More Twain-grade nonsense lives on our page of the strangest sentences in classic literature.

13. Truth and fiction

Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.

Following the Equator, epigraph to chapter XV, from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar”

Pudd’nhead came along on what Twain calls his lecturing-trip around the world: the chapters of Following the Equator open with entries from a “New Calendar”. Right above this one sits a drier version of the same thought, in which the writer says he is measurably familiar with truth.

14. Man is the only animal that blushes

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

Following the Equator, epigraph to chapter XXVII, from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar”

The capital letters make it look like a museum label, and the three-word sentence knocks it down. It is the shape of Twain’s best one-liners: a solemn statement, a pause, a correction.

Quick reference

Three famous Mark Twain quotes we could not find

We searched the full texts of eight Twain books: Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Pudd’nhead Wilson, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi and Following the Equator. None of these lines is in them.

• The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. We could not find it in any of the eight. We looked into where it does come from on a separate page: did Mark Twain say “the two most important days in your life”?
• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. We could not find it in any of the eight, nor the “throw off the bowlines” sentence that usually follows it.
• The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. We could not find it in any of the eight.

Absence from eight books is not proof, since Twain also wrote letters, speeches and newspaper pieces, but it is a fair test. If you like this kind of checking, our Charles Dickens quotes get the same treatment. And for a last real line from the Following the Equator calendar, the epigraph to chapter LXVI: Every one is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.

Sources

• Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Project Gutenberg #76
• Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Project Gutenberg #74
• Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, Project Gutenberg #102
• Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Project Gutenberg #3176
• Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, Project Gutenberg #245
• Mark Twain, Following the Equator, Project Gutenberg #2895
• Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, Project Gutenberg #119 (searched)
• Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Project Gutenberg #86 (searched)