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Quotes of the Day for 30 November 2004 - Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on this day in 1835 at Florida, Missouri and grew up along the Mississippi River. He started setting type in a newspaper shop at age 12, abandoned his writing career at 21 to become a river boat pilot, a career that ended four years later when the Civil War ended river traffic. He went west, writing for newspapers in Nevada and California. Fortunately for us, he made a series of bad investments that forced him to write a staggering amount under the name of Mark Twain. "Mark Twain" was the sounding call of the leadsman on a riverboat, indicating two fathoms (twelve feet) of water, a safe depth for the riverboats. Here is a tiny fraction of the Twain quotes I've collected.

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

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.

Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.

Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.

Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of 80 and gradually approach 18.

Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it
     - All from Mark Twain, 1835 - 1910

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