English Mark-twain Thoughts

"The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex, overwhelming tasks into small, manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one"

"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"

"No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester Alan Arthur , and no one ever retired … more generally respected, alike by political friend and foe"

"of course if Mark Twain had a little more courage Nigger Jim would have been more of the father figure that he obviously is, instead of a sort of Mammy figure that is part of the other tradition Twain has to deal with"

"[A] hack writer who would not have been considered fourth rate in Europe, who tricked out a few of the old proven 'sure fire' literary skeletons with sufficient local color to intrigue the superficial and the lazy"

"He [Mark Twain] spoke of humor, and thought it must be one of the chief attributes of God. He cited plants and animals that were distinctly humorous in form and in their characteristics. These he declared were God's jokes"

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn . But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since"

"From his earliest childhood young Clemens had been of an adventurous disposition. Before he was thirteen he had been extracted three times from the Mississippi and six times from Bear Creek in a substantially drowned condition, but his mother, with the high confidence in his future that never deserted her, merely remarked: "People who are born to be hanged are safe in the water."

"I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your works as indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of Voltaire"

"Mark Twain is a heroic figure in literature, and everybody who studies American literature or American history knows about Mark Twain as a great novelist. But how many people are taught in our schools or in our books that Mark Twain was a leader of the Anti-Imperialist League at the turn of the century? That he spoke out against the invasion of the Philippines?"

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover"

"Not a single right is indestructible: a new might can at any time abolish it, hence, man possesses not a single permanent right. God is Might (and He is shifty, malicious, and uncertain)"