The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain
Three Point Summary | Notes on big ideas from intriguing books
Samuel Clemens, known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, and lecturer. He’s been praised as the “the father of American literature.”
When it comes to writing, Mark Twain was him.
Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which they never show to anybody.
—Mark Twain
I. Principles
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
Principles have no real effect except when one is well fed…prosperity is the best protector of principle.
The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.
When in doubt, tell the truth.
Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket.
Whenever you are on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
Let us endeavor to live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.
To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing.
The best way to cheer yourself up is to try and cheer someone else up.
The lack of money is the root of all evil.
When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries of life disappear and life stands explained.
Life does not consist mainly—or even largely—of facts and happenings. It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
II. Wit
There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.
Humor is mankind's greatest blessing.
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 not in forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining and wants it back the minute it begins to rain.
If Christ were here now, there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.
Communism is idiocy.
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 got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.
III. Culture
An Englishman is a person who does things because they have done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven’t been done before.
We (America) hoisted the banner of revolution and raised the first genuine shout for human liberty that had ever been heard.
In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.