Autobiographies

"Fair seedtime had my soul, and I grew up Fostered alike by beauty and by fear."

"The earth is all before me. With a heart Joyous, nor scared at its own liberty, I look about; and should the chosen guide Be nothing better than a wandering cloud, I cannot miss my way."

"There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead."

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!"

"And Como! thou, a treasure whom the earth Keeps to herself, confined as in a depth Of Abyssinian privacy. I spake Of thee, thy chestnut woods, and garden plots Of Indian-corn tended by dark-eyed maids; Thy lofty steeps, and pathways roofed with vines, Winding from house to house, from town to town, Sole link that binds them to each other; walks, League after league, and cloistral avenues, Where silence dwells if music be not there: While yet a youth undisciplined in verse, Through fond ambition of that hour, I strove To chant your praise; nor can approach you now Ungreeted by a more melodious song, Where tones of nature smoothed by learned art May flow in lasting current. Like a breeze Or sunbeam over your domain I passed In motion without pause; but ye have left Your beauty with me, a serene accord Of forms and colors, passive, yet endowed In their submissiveness with power as sweet And gracious, almost might I dare to say, As virtue is, or goodness; sweet as love, Or the remembrance of a generous deed, Or mildest visitation of pure thought, When God, the giver of all joy, is thanked Religiously, in silent blessedness; Sweet as this last herself, for such it is."

"An , in the highest sense of that word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol; and, except in geometry, all symbols of necessity involve an apparent contradiction."

"'Tis told by one whom stormy waters threw, With fellow-sufferers by the shipwreck spared, Upon a desert coast, that having brought To land a single volume, saved by chance, A treatise of Geometry."

"Oh! give us once again the wishing cap Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood, And Sabra in the forest with St. George! The child, whose love is here, at least, doth reap One precious gain, that he forgets himself."

"With the din Smitten, the precipices rang aloud; The leafless trees and every icy crag Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills Into the tumult sent an alien sound Of melancholy."

"And I was taught to feel, perhaps too much, The self-sufficing power of Solitude."

"That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith."

"The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate: or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead."

"“Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding.”"

"Our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination."

"How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!"

"Thirty-five years after those old exploits... I visited my old mother; and being moved by what seemed... a rather heroic and noble impulse I thought I would... confess my ancient fault. ...To my astonishment... she was not moved in the least degree; she simply did not believe me..."

"Carlyle said "a lie cannot live." It shows that he did not know how to tell them. If I had taken out a life policy on this one the premiums would have bankrupted me ages ago."

"...now...that I am a wise person. As for me, I wish there were some more of us in the world, for I find it lonesome."

"No accident ever comes late; it always arrives precisely on time."

"In 1847... the conversation fell upon Virginia and old times. I was present, but the group were probably quite unconscious of me, I being a lad and a negligeable quantity. Two of the group... had been of the audience when the Richmond theatre burned down thirty-six years before, and they talked over the frightful details... and with their eyes I saw it all with an intolerable vividness... The picture is before me yet, and can never fade. ...[T]hree or four years later... I was king-bee and sole "subject" in the mesmeric show... I was trying to invent something fresh in the way of a vision... The vision developed by degrees, and gathered swing, momentum, energy! It was the Richmond fire. ...the fact stood proven that I had seen it in my vision. Lawks! It is curious. When the magician's engagement closed there was but one person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the one. All the others were converted, but I was to remain an implacable and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon fifty years."

"Brooklyn praise is half slander."

"...when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity."

"It is a pity we can't escape from life when we are young."

"There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled."

"Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes."

"...from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this.)"

"...I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility."

"There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it."

"...my sister...was an interested and zealous invalid during sixty-five years, tried all the new diseases as fast as they came out, and always enjoyed the newest one more than any that went before; my brother had accumulated forty-two brands of Christianity before he was called away."

"Persons who think there is no such thing as luck—good or bad—are entitled to their opinion, although I think they ought to be shot for it."

"We are always anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess."

"[William Dean] Howells applauded, and was full of praises and endorsement, which was wise in him and judicious. If he had manifested a different spirit I would have thrown him out of the window. I like criticism, but it must be my way."

"When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life."

"Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech."

"If she were drowning I would not look—but I would not pull her out. I would not be a party to that last and meanest unkindness, treachery to a would-be suicide. My sympathies have been with the suicides for many, many years. I am always glad when the suicide succeeds in his undertaking. I always feel a genuine pain in my heart, a genuine grief, a genuine pity, when some scoundrel stays the suicide's hand and compels him to continue his life."

"The first thing I ever noticed about Miss Lyon was her incredible laziness. Laziness was my own specialty, & I did not like this competition. Dear me, I was to find out, in the course of time, that in the matter of laziness I was a runaway train on a down grade & she a-standing still. At my very laziest I could hear myself whiz, when she was around."

"...a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute..."

"NOTICE. To the next Burglar. There is nothing but plated ware in this house, now and henceforth. You will find it in that brass thing in the dining room over in the corner by the basket of kittens. If you want the basket, put the kittens in the brass thing. Do not make a noise—it disturbs the family. You will find rubbers in the front hall, by that thing which has the umbrellas in it, chiffonier, I think they call it, or pergola, or something like that. Please close the door when you go away. Very truly yours, S.L. Clemens"

"...it seems to be a law of the human constitution that those that deserve shall not have, and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having. It is a sufficiently crazy arrangement, it seems to me."

"...a professor in one of the great female colleges. That odious form is common, and I submit and use it, though it offends me as much as it would to say female brickbat or female snow-storm or female geography."

"...why doesn't somebody write a tract on "How to Be a Christian and yet keep your Hands off of Other People's Things.""

"I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it. And besides, I have lived with liars so long that I have lost the tune, & a fact jars upon me like a discord."

"In grandchildren I am the richest man that lives to-day: for I select my grandchildren, whereas all other grandfathers have to take them as they come, good, bad, and indifferent."

"...in October 1866 I broke out as a lecturer, and from that day to this I have always been able to gain my living without doing any work; for the writing of books and magazine matter was always play, not work. I enjoyed it; it was merely billiards to me."

"No doubt the great majority of them are in the cemetery long ago, and I suppose the rest of us will join them before long. Speaking for myself I am willing; in fact I believe I have been willing ever since I was eighteen years old; not urgent, but willing, merely willing."

"I sent down a circular check to the office to be cashed—a check good for its face in any part of the world, as any ordinary ass would know—but the ass who was assifying for the Queen Anne Mansions on salary didn't know it; indeed I think that his assitude transcended any assfulness I have ever met in this world or elsewhere."

"I had now—not for the first time, nor the thousandth—trampled upon an old and wise and stern maxim of mine, to wit: "Supposing is good, but finding out is better.""

"I have not read Nietzsche or Ibsen, nor any other philosopher, and have not needed to do it, and have not desired to do it; I have gone to the fountain-head for information—that is to say, to the human race. Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race. I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born; I knew I should not find a single original thought in any philosophy, and I knew I could not furnish one to the world myself, if I had five centuries to invent it in. Nietzsche published his book, and was at once pronounced crazy by the world—by a world which included tens of thousands of bright, sane men who believed exactly as Nietzsche believed, but concealed the fact, and scoffed at Nietzsche. What a coward every man is! and how surely he will find it out if he will just let other people alone and sit down and examine himself. The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner."

"It is my hope sir, that the ass who invented the "age of consent"—any age of consent between cradle and grave—is with his progenitors in hell, and that the legislatures that are keeping the resulting law in force will follow him soon."

"....it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence."