The line The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why is credited to Mark Twain on mugs, graduation cards and conference slides. We searched the whole of Project Gutenberg’s Twain, nearly three million words of books, sketches, essays and stories, plus his collected letters and speeches, and it is not there. The real Twain wrote about birth, purpose and turning-points more than once, and what he said is closer to the opposite.
The claim: Twain and “the two most important days in your life”
The wording is fairly stable: two days, the day you are born (or were born), and the day you find out (or discover) why. It is credited to Twain without a book or a date, the usual sign of a floating line. Twain is a natural magnet for these. He was famous for epigrams, he published a whole mock almanac of them and then a sequel, Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar, in Following the Equator, and he has been quoted on everything for well over a century, so a neat aphorism with a little twist in its tail gets his name by default.
This one, though, does not sound much like him. Twain’s maxims usually end on a sting, a deflation of human vanity. The “find out why” line ends on uplift. That is a reason to check, not a proof, so we checked.
What we searched
- The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain, Gutenberg #3200: the novels, travel books, sketches, essays and stories in one file, about 2.84 million words
- Mark Twain’s Letters, Complete (1853-1910), Gutenberg #3199, about 283,000 words
- Mark Twain’s Speeches, Gutenberg #3188, about 97,000 words
- Europe and Elsewhere, Gutenberg #68604, about 118,000 words
- What Is Man? and Other Essays, Gutenberg #70, searched separately as a cross-check
We lower-cased the texts, stripped punctuation and searched for: most important days, most important day, two most important, important days, day you were born, day you are born, you find out why, the day you find out why, discover why and why you were born.
The results are almost all zeros. “Two most important” appears once, in Following the Equator, about the two most important colonies of Australasia
. “Find out why” appears twice in fiction, once about books that don’t balance and once about why a snorer can’t hear himself snore. Nothing in the letters, nothing in the speeches.
Twain’s real “two great days”
The search did turn up one lovely near miss. In chapter XVI of Following the Equator (1897), his book about the round-the-world lecture tour, Twain explains that Melbourne Cup day is Australia’s one supreme holiday, and compares other countries:
In Great Britain and Ireland they have two great days—Christmas and the Queen’s birthday. But they are equally popular; there is no supremacy.
Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), chapter XVI
So Twain did write about a country’s two great days, and one of them is a birthday. He is not being inspirational. A paragraph earlier he says that most grown Americans dread the Fourth of July and that Christmas brings harassment to many excellent people. The point is comic: nobody can agree on which day matters most.
What Twain actually wrote about the day you were born
Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, the mock almanac whose entries head each chapter of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), has a line about birth, and it has the sting the modern quote lacks:
Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved.
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), epigraph to chapter IX
This is Twain’s real verdict on the day you are born: a celebration for everyone except the baby. Another entry, at the head of chapter III, even uses the phrase “find out”, though what you find out is not your purpose:
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Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), epigraph to chapter III
Put the two beside the mug and the difference is plain. The modern line promises that life holds a discovery that makes sense of it. Twain’s Calendar says, with a straight face, that what you discover is that death was a kindness.
Twain on the one day that changes everything
The fullest answer is a late essay, “The Turning-Point of My Life”, which Albert Bigelow Paine’s authorised biography lists as published in Harper’s Bazar in February 1910, a few months before Twain died. The magazine had asked several writers to describe the moment that set their course. Twain begins by declining the premise:
I know we have a fashion of saying “such and such an event was the turning-point in my life,” but we shouldn’t say it. We should merely grant that its place as LAST link in the chain makes it the most conspicuous link; in real importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors.
Mark Twain, “The Turning-Point of My Life”, in What Is Man? and Other Essays, part I
This is about as direct a rebuttal of the “day you find out why” idea as you could ask for, written by the man it is credited to. There is no single day of discovery, he says, only a long chain of accidents, measles and a printing apprenticeship among them, each as necessary as the last. He then traces the chain back as far as it goes:
Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of yours) was the Garden of Eden.
Mark Twain, “The Turning-Point of My Life”, in What Is Man? and Other Essays
Where the line came from
We could not establish its origin, and we will not repeat the various names attached to it elsewhere without a dated source in hand. A phrase search of the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America newspapers for “the day you were born and the day” returned nothing. “Day you find out why” returned a single page, the Laramie Republican of 30 July 1910; we read it, and it is a comic poem about a false friend: Until some day you find out why / He has been good to you. A coincidence, not the source.
For the Twain lines that really are his, see our collection of Mark Twain quotes, along with book quotes about time and the weirdest quotes in classic literature. Our other quote checks cover Oscar Wilde’s “be yourself” and Frederick Douglass’s “forever free”.
The check at a glance
| Claim | Searched | Found? | What Twain wrote instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| The two most important days in your life | Entire Works (#3200), Letters (#3199), Speeches (#3188), Europe and Elsewhere (#68604) | No | “two great days—Christmas and the Queen’s birthday” (Following the Equator, ch. XVI) |
| the day you are born | Same texts | No | “we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral” (Pudd’nhead Wilson, ch. IX) |
| the day you find out why | Same texts | No | “Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is” (Pudd’nhead Wilson, ch. III) |
| One day that gives life its purpose | “The Turning-Point of My Life” (#70) | Rejected by Twain | “we shouldn’t say it” |
The closest Twain came to naming the most important day of a life was to put it before anyone was born at all, in the Garden of Eden.
Sources
- Mark Twain, The Entire Project Gutenberg Works of Mark Twain, Project Gutenberg #3200
- Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Letters, Complete (1853-1910), Project Gutenberg #3199
- Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Speeches, Project Gutenberg #3188
- Mark Twain, Europe and Elsewhere, Project Gutenberg #68604
- Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Project Gutenberg #102
- Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), Project Gutenberg #2895
- Mark Twain, What Is Man? and Other Essays, Project Gutenberg #70
- Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, appendix of works by year, Project Gutenberg #2988
- Laramie Republican, 30 July 1910, page 2, via Library of Congress, Chronicling America