Mark Twain (November 30, 1835-April 21, 1910) a river measurement meaning "two fathoms deep," was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
Growing up along the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Missouri, he left school at age 12, when his father died.
Becoming a printer's apprentice, he worked briefly for his brother Orion Clemens, who owned a newspaper. For the next several years, he was a "tramp printer," working and writing in St. Louis, New York City, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and numerous smaller cities.
In 1857-61, as an apprentice Mississippi river pilot, he acquired his pen name from an old steamboat pilot who had died, named Isaiah Sellers, known for writing articles in a New Orleans newspaper and signing them "Mark Twain."
The onset of the Civil War virtually halted all river traffic, so Twain joined the Confederate Army as a lieutenant. After two weeks' service, he managed to get himself discharged and headed out to Nevada to work for his brother Orion, who had become the Secretary to the Governor of the Nevada Territory.
After a futile attempt at mining, he took a job, in 1862, as a reporter in Virginia City, Nevada, using the name "Mark Twain" for the first time.
After a few years, Mark Twain moved to San Francisco, where he wrote his first popular story titled, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."
He then began voyaging, particularly in the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine, where he wrote The Innocents Abroad. While on this trip, he fell in love with the picture of a companion's sister, Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York.
Immediately upon his return, he met and married her, and, under her encouragement, his writing style greatly improved.
In 1870, they moved from Buffalo, N.Y., to Hartford, Conn., where his attempt at a publishing and typesetting business failed. He paid off his debts by conducting a lecture tour across America, then moved to Europe. After several years, they returned back to the United States, settling in Redding, Conn. In later years, his increased public success was offset by the tragedy of nearly all his family members dying before him.
The many novels written by Mark Twain include: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876; Life on the Mississippi, 1883; The Prince and the Pauper, 1882; A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, 1889; Joan of Arc, 1896; and many more. In the midst of cynics who doubted the authenticity of Scripture, Mark Twain remarked:
<If the Ten Commandments were not written by Moses, then they were written by another fellow of the same name.> 1835MT001
In his work Innocents Abroad, 1869, which solidly established his reputation as a writer, Mark Twain wrote:
<It is hard to make a choice of the most beautiful passage in a book which is so gemmed with beautiful passages as the Bible; but it is certain that not many things within its lids may take rank above the exquisite story of Joseph. Who taught those ancient writers their simplicity of language, their felicity of expression, their pathos, and above all, their faculty of sinking themselves entirely out of sight of the reader and making the narrative stand out alone and seem to tell itself? Shakespeare is always present when one reads his book; Macaulay is present when we follow the march of his stately sentences; but the Old Testament writers are hidden from view.> 1835MT002
In chapter XLIV of Innocents Abroad, 1869, Mark Twain wrote:
<Then we called at the tomb of Mahomet's children and at a tomb which purported to be that of St. George who killed the dragon, and so on out to the hollow place under a rock where Paul hid during his flight till his pursuers gave him up; and to the mausoleum of the five thousand Christians who were massacred in Damascus in 1861 by the Turks.
They say those narrow streets ran blood for several days, and that men, women and children were butchered indiscriminately and left to rot by hundreds all through the Christian quarter; they say, further, that the stench was dreadful.
All the Christians who could get away fled from the city, and the Mohammedans would not defile their hands by burying the "infidel dogs." The thirst for blood extended to the high lands of Hermon and Anti-Lebanon, and in a short time twenty-five thousand more Christians were massacred and their possessions laid waste. How they hate a Christian in Damascus!--and pretty much all over Turkeydom as well.
And how they will pay for it when Russia turns her guns upon them again! It is soothing to the heart to abuse England and France for interposing to save the Ottoman Empire from the destruction it has so richly deserved for a thousand years. It hurts my vanity to see these pagans refuse to eat of food that has been cooked for us; or to eat from a dish we have eaten from; or to drink from a goatskin which we have polluted with our Christian lips, except by filtering the water through a rag which they put over the mouth of it or through a sponge!
I never disliked a Chinaman as I do these degraded Turks and Arabs, and when Russia is ready to war with them again, I hope England and France will not find it good breeding or good judgment to interfere...> 1835MT102
In chapter XLVII of Innocents Abroad, 1869, Mark Twain wrote:
<We dismounted on those shores which the feet of the Saviour had made holy ground....We left Capernaum behind us. It was only a shapeless ruin.
It bore no semblance to a town. But, all desolate and unpeopled as it was, it was illustrious ground. From it sprang that tree of Christianity whose broad arms overshadow so many distant lands today. Christ visited his old home at Nazareth, and saw His brothers Joses, Judas, James, and Simon....
Who wonders what passed in their minds when they saw this brother (who was only a brother to them, however He might be to others a mysterious stranger; who was a God, and had stood face to face with God above the clouds) doing miracles, with crowds of astonished people for witnesses?> 1835MT003
<One of the most astonishing things that has yet fallen under our observation is the exceedingly small portion of the earth from which sprang the new flourishing plant of Christianity. The longest journey our Saviour ever performed was from here to Jerusalem-about one hundred to one hundred and twenty miles....Leaving out two or three short journeys, He spent His life, preaching His Gospel, and performing His miracles, within a compass no larger than an ordinary county of the United States....
In the starlight, Galilee has no boundaries but the broad compass of the heavens, and is a theatre meet for great events; meet for the birth of a religion able to save the world; and meet for the stately figure appointed to stand upon its stage and proclaim high decrees.> 1835MT004
In Innocents Abroad, chapter LIII, Mark Twain described the condition of Jerusalem under Turkish Muslim rule:
<A fast walker could go outside the walls of Jerusalem and walk entirely around the city in an hour...The monotony of the view is interrupted only by the great Mosque of Omar, the Tower of Hippicus, and one or two other buildings that rise into commanding prominence...The streets are roughly and badly paved with stone, and are tolerably crooked...it is hardly necessary to state that such streets are too narrow for carriages. These vehicles cannot navigate the Holy City.
The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. One hundred of the latter sect are all that dwell now in this birthplace of Christianity. The nice shades of nationality comprised in the above list, and the languages spoken by them, are altogether too numerous to mention. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem.
Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand, and they know but one word of but one language apparently--the eternal "bucksheesh." To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda.
Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here...
The Moslems watch the Golden Gate with a jealous eye, and an anxious one, for they have an honored tradition that when it falls, Islamism will fall and with it the Ottoman Empire. It did not grieve me any to notice that the old gate was getting a little shaky.> 1835MT104
Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad, chapter LVI:
<Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes. Over it broods the spell of a curse that has withered its fields and fettered its energies. Where Sodom and Gomorrah reared their domes and towers, that solemn sea now floods the plain, in whose bitter waters no living thing exists - over whose waveless surface the blistering air hangs motionless and dead - about whose borders nothing grows but weeds, and scattering tufts of cane, and that treacherous fruit that promises refreshment to parching lips, but turns to ashes at the touch. Nazareth is forlorn; about that ford of Jordan where the hosts of Israel entered the Promised Land with songs of rejoicing, one finds only a squalid camp of fantastic Bedouins of the desert; Jericho the accursed, lies a moldering ruin, to-day, even as Joshua's miracle left it more than three thousand years ago; Bethlehem and Bethany, in their poverty and their humiliation, have nothing about them now to remind one that they once knew the high honor of the Saviour's presence; the hallowed spot where the shepherds watched their flocks by night, and where the angels sang Peace on earth, good will to men, is untenanted by any living creature, and unblessed by any feature that is pleasant to the eye.
Renowned Jerusalem itself, the stateliest name in history, has lost all its ancient grandeur, and is become a pauper village; the riches of Solomon are no longer there to compel the admiration of visiting Oriental queens; the wonderful temple which was the pride and the glory of Israel, is gone, and the Ottoman crescent is lifted above the spot where, on that most memorable day in the annals of the world, they reared the Holy Cross.
The noted Sea of Galilee, where Roman fleets once rode at anchor and the disciples of the Saviour sailed in their ships, was long ago deserted by the devotees of war and commerce, and its borders are a silent wilderness; Capernaum is a shapeless ruin; Magdala is the home of beggared Arabs; Bethsaida and Chorazin have vanished from the earth, and the "desert places" round about them where thousands of men once listened to the Saviour's voice and ate the miraculous bread, sleep in the hush of a solitude that is inhabited only by birds of prey and skulking foxes. Palestine is desolate and unlovely.
And why should it be otherwise? Can the curse of the Deity beautify a land? Palestine is no more of this work-day world. It is sacred to poetry and tradition--it is dream-land.> 1835MT105
Mark Twain described the Muslim Ottoman Sultan in Innocents Abroad, chapter XIII:
<ABDUL-AZIZ, Sultan of Turkey, Lord of the Ottoman Empire! Born to a throne; weak, stupid, ignorant, almost, as his meanest slave; chief of a vast royalty, yet the puppet of his Premier and the obedient child of a tyrannical mother; a man who sits upon a throne--the beck of whose finger moves navies and armies--who holds in his hands the power of life and death over millions-- yet who sleeps, sleeps, eats, eats, idles with his eight hundred concubines, and when he is surfeited with eating and sleeping and idling, and would rouse up and take the reins of government and threaten to be a sultan, is charmed from his purpose by wary Fuad Pacha with a pretty plan for a new palace or a new ship-- charmed away with a new toy, like any other restless child; a man who sees his people robbed and oppressed by soulless tax-gatherers, but speaks no word to save them; who believes in gnomes and genii and the wild fables of The Arabian Nights, but has small regard for the mighty magicians of to-day, and is nervous in the presence of their mysterious railroads and steamboats and telegraphs; who would see undone in Egypt all that great Mehemet Ali achieved, and would prefer rather to forget than emulate him; a man who found his great empire a blot upon the earth--a degraded, poverty-stricken, miserable, infamous agglomeration of ignorance, crime, and brutality--and will idle away the allotted days of his trivial life and then pass to the dust and the worms and leave it so!> 1835MT106
Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad, chapter XLII:
<If ever an oppressed race existed, it is this one we see fettered around us under the inhuman tyranny of the Ottoman Empire. I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little--not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell.> 1835MT107
In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, 1876, chapter 13, Mark Twain wrote:
<There was no getting around the stubborn fact that taking sweetmeats was only "hooking," while taking bacon and hams and such valuables was plain simple stealing-and there was a command against that in the Bible. So they inwardly resolved that so long as they remained in the business, their piracies should not again be sullied with the crime of stealing.> 1835MT005
In The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894, Mark Twain penned:
<Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.> 1835MT006
<Adam was but human-this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it because it was forbidden.> 1835MT007
<Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.> 1835MT008
<It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.> 1835MT009
Mark Twain quipped:
<The calm confidence of a Christian with four aces.> 1835MT010
<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 the old man had learned in seven years.> 1835MT011
From Albert Bigelow Paine's Mark Twain, 1912, Mark Twain is quoted as saying:
<As out of place as a Presbyterian in Hell.> 1835MT012
From Bernard De Voto's Mark Twain in Eruption, 1940, Mark Twain is quoted as saying:
<I believe that our Heavenly Father invented man because he was disappointed with the monkey.> 1835MT013
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American Quotations by William J. Federer, 2024, All Rights Reserved, Permission granted to use with acknowledgement.
Endnotes:
1835MT001. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain. Henry and Dana Thomas, 1942. Charles E. Jones, The Books You Read (Harrisburg, PA: Executive Books, 1985), p. 133.
1835MT002. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, p. 492. Stephen Abbott Northrop, D.D., A Cloud of Witnesses (Portland, OR: American Heritage Ministries, 1987; Mantle Ministries, 228 Still Ridge, Bulverde, Texas), p. 88.
1835MT102. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, 1869, chapter XLIV.
1835MT003. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, pp. 499-502. Stephen Abbott Northrop, D.D., A Cloud of Witnesses (Portland, OR: American Heritage Ministries, 1987; Mantle Ministries, 228 Still Ridge, Bulverde, Texas), p. 88.
1835MT004. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, p. 513. Stephen Abbott Northrop, D.D., A Cloud of Witnesses (Portland, OR: American Heritage Ministries, 1987; Mantle Ministries, 228 Still Ridge, Bulverde, Texas), pp. 88- 89.
1835MT104. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, 1869, Chapter LIII.
1835MT105. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, 1869, Chapter LVI.
1835MT106. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, 1869, Chapter XIII.
1835MT107. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad, or the New Pilgrim's Progress, 1869, Chapter XLII.
1835MT005. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, 1876, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, chapter 13. John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 622.
1835MT006. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, 1894, in Pudd'nhead Wilson. Lewis C. Henry, Best Quotations For All Occasions (Greenwich, CONN: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1961), p. 8.
1835MT007. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, 1894, in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, chapter 2. John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 624.
1835MT008. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, 1894, in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar, chapter 3. John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 624.
1835MT0019. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain, 1897, in Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar, chapter 20. John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 625.
1835MT010. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain. Attributed. John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 626.
1835MT011. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain. Perry Tanksley, To Love is to Give (Jackson, Mississippi: Allgood Books, Box 1329; Parthenon Press, 201 8th Ave., South, Nashville, Tennessee, 1972), p. 77.
1835MT012. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain. 1912, from Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain. John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 626.
1835MT013. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Mark Twain. 1940, from Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain in Eruption. John Bartlett, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1855, 1980), p. 626.