Mark Twain - Mark Twain on Common Sense: Timeless Advice and Words of Wisdom from America?s Most-Revered Humorist

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Print ISBN: 978-1-62873-799-8

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-62914-078-0

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CONTENTS

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narration 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.

By Order of the Author.

YOUTH AND OLD AGE

Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

The elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.

Adam and Eve had many advantages but the principal one was, that they escaped teething.

For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment.

When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I was twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.

Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.

I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

There is but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering and that is the fact that it is pastand cant be restored.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didnt do than by the ones you did do.

At fifty a man can be an ass without being an optimist, but not an optimist without being an ass.

The past may not repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.

What is human life? The first third is a good time; the rest is remembering it.

Wrinkles should merely indicate where smiles have been.

The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.

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

I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolish.

The man who is a pessimist before forty-eight knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little.

Nothing that grieves us can be called little; by the eternal laws of proportion a childs loss of a doll and a kings loss of a crown are events of the same size.

He had double chins all the way down to his stomach.

When I was younger I could remember everything, whether it happened or not.

Whatever a mans age, he can reduce it by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole.

All say, how hard it is to have to diea strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.

Frankness is a jewel only the young can afford.

When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, its a sure sign youre getting old.

The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting ones clothes.

Get a bicycle. You will not regret it. If you live.

There comes a time in every rightly constructed boys life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.

No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.

There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.

Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.

Its well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they cant sleep anyhow.

A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother.

Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambition. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.

Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.

The only way to keep your health is to eat what you dont want, drink what you dont like, and do what youd rather not.

It isnt so astonishing the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things that I can remember that arent so.

We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

EDUCATION

You shouldnt try to teach a pig to sing. You waste your time and it annoys the pig.

Education consists mainly in what we have unlearned.

Whats the use you learning to do right, when its troublesome to do right and aint no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

Never learn to do anything. If you dont learn, you will always find someone else to do it for you.

The more you explain it, the more I dont understand it.

For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.

A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom that he can no longer be led by the nose.

Everything has its limitiron ore cannot be educated into gold.

Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.

Four years at West Point and plenty of books and schooling will learn a man a great deal. It wont learn him the river.

Dont go around thinking the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.

Troubles are only mental; it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them.

Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thought that is forever flowing through ones head.

Training is everything. The peach was once the bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Use the right word and not its second cousin.

Dont part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.

Education is the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.

Intellectual work is misnamed; it is pleasure, a dissipation, and its own highest reward.

You may have noticed that the less I know about a subject the more confidence I have, and the more new light I throw on it.

You cant depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus.

Cast iron rules will not answer. What is one mans colon is another mans comma.

When I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said that if they stopped building schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.