Mark Twain Quotes, Life & Philosophies

Mark Twain Quotes

The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

Mark Twain Life & Philosophies

Mark Twain was actually born Samuel Clemens on November the 30th 1835 in Florida, Missouri as one of seven children. He quickly watched many of his siblings to come and died during childhood.

Only three Clemens Children reached out about it. At the age of four, Samuel moved with his family to the town of Hannibal, situated on the Mississippi River.

His father, John Marshall Clemens, worked as a sometimes attorney and sometimes judge.

Samuel’s mother was named Jane, who hailed from Kentucky. During his childhood, Samuel would often play around the port of Hannibal, swimming and fishing and creating memories that would inform his future works.

John Clemens took ill with pneumonia when Samuel was 11 and passed away. They hadn’t much to speak for financially even before he died, but they were especially bad off afterwards.

Even at his young age, Samuel had to find work to help around the house, all while still continuing his education at school.

Still, money was a pressing enough need that he eventually to quit classes altogether after the fifth grade.

Interestingly enough, some of the first jobs he had were with local newspapers. He operated presses for one and wrote short stories for another.

By the time he reached the age of 18 he had struck out of his small Missouri town and headed for the brighter working environs of the big city, moving from New York City to Philadelphia to ST Louis, Samuel even joined a printer’s trade union while continuing his education on his own by visiting the vast libraries of the cities in which he dwelled. The water seemed to still call to him.

The river and docks where he grew up had a hold over him, and he wanted to learn how best to traverse them.

The idea of becoming a boat pilot entranced him, and he took on an apprenticeship with a license steamboat pilot learn how to navigate the mighty Mississippi and navigate he did, reading the currents and learning how to avoid the dangers that any pilot could encounter on such a huge body of water rinse.

In two years, he earned his license. He also encountered a term that would stick with him.

It was a standard depth of water that was safe for a steamboat to travel in equal to 12 ft or two fathoms known to boatman as Mark Twain. He would also soon adopted as his pen name.

As the civil war began to brew in 1861 Clemens, now age 26 decided to strike out in the American West. He had served on the Mississippi for a few years, even offering his brother Henry a job on a steamboat.

 

That partnership ended in tragedy is Henry was killed when the boat boiler went up in flames.

 

Samuel was beside himself with grief and then, seeing the brother against brother conflict of the Civil War rearing its ugly head, he finally decided to take a new opportunity.

Working in Nevada with another sibling, Iran. Iran, Clemens became the secretary of the Nevada Territory in 1861 working under Governor James Ni, Samuel joined Iran and the two-headed West on a two-week stagecoach trip.

He decided to leave the voyage and set foot in Virginia City, Nevada, where he tried his like mining. It didn’t last long, and he soon took a more familiar position of the local paper.

This is notable because it was the first time, he officially used his pen name, Mark Twain, in 1863 human piece.

So, this is what we shall refer to him as From now on, Mark Twain would tuck away all sorts of experiences and stories he gained while spending time in the West, travelling to San Francisco and enjoying the weather and fruits that California had to offer.

During this time, he produced his first published success, the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County, which was printed in a New York paper and quickly gained him the following.

In 1867 Twain was offered a chance to tour Europe and the Mediterranean with his newspaper employer Footing.

The Bill Thies travels inspired the work the Innocents Abroad, but also on the trip; he befriended a fellow passenger named Charles Langdon.

When Langdon showed Mark a photograph of his sister, Olivia, Twain was taken aback by her beauty and fell in love instantly.

The two kept in contact for the next two years, Twain tried to compel her to marry him once, but she rejected him.

On February 1870, Olivia finally relented, and the do were wed in New York, where they would live for a time. Now,

In 1873 Twain and Olivia would begin to set some roots in Hartford, Connecticut. They had a home built, though Olivia had a separate part of the house designed for Mark to be able to write in and smoke his cigars, a habit she detested.

The Hartford House was where Twain would produce some of his most treasured classics. They had three daughters while they resided there, a swell Susie, Clara and Jeanne.

The next-door neighbour was Hamlet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

When they went on summer vacation, they visited Olivia’s sister, who lived in the same town in which they were married and spent time with a wealthy family.

Twain would use these respites to upstate New York to write.

Well, his writings were gaining him. Maura Maura an audience by these times.

But 18 76 is The Adventures of Tom Soil was the novel that brought him worldwide acclaim.

Twain leaned every experience he had from his childhood to bring a story to the life of the young, titular character and his times growing up along the Mississippi River.

It was also one of the first novels created on a typewriter considered an absolute classic American literature Tom Sawyer set him on a streak of success is he was making money and travelling all over the country on leisure circuits.

He also really loved writing Travel books is evidenced by 18 eighties of Tramp Abroad, which detailed Twain and his time in Germany, France and Switzerland.

The book offered a taste of his wit, with the classic fish out of water device playing well within American. Out of his element in Europe.

The Prince and the Pauper were released in 1881. Twain was now on a roll. The tail dealt with two characters who switched identities in 16th century England.

Twain used the plot to expose social injustice and show just how differently separate classes of people were and always have been.

In 1883 Twain again revisited his beloved river routes in life on the Mississippi. With this, he actually turned a bit scholarly, educating on the history of the river but with the bit of his riverboat piloting expertise sprinkled in.

Life on the Mississippi, was almost a primer for Twain, however, as he was in 1884 flash out one of old Tom Sawyer’s friends for a novel of his own. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Huckleberry Finn would take on an even more socially conscious slant than much of his previous work, as Twain looked at the burning wasteland of the Civil War and the way that African Americans were being treated, turning a mirror on Americans in the process.

1889 is a Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s court was one of Twain’s last big novels. In it, a man wakes up suddenly thrust into the time of King Arthur Twain was able to implement much of his darker, cynical sides that was creeping in as he approached his golden years.

There would be much more to be dark and cynical about; he would soon discover Twain actually used his own publishing company for the first time in the printing of Huckleberry Finn.

He was keen to maintain artistic control and make the money that his art was bringing in. It would make you think that Twain had a good sense of finances and how to spend it wisely.

But you would be wrong. He was terrible investing money.

He was amazed by the technology and often through vast sums of money at new inventions that he thought would change the world.

The page typesetting machine was a glorious failure that he loved with his heart on his wallet.

The world was evolving at such a rate, and newspapers and print were blowing up so fast that the handset-type machine simply couldn’t cut it anymore.

The page machine promised to take prints into the New World, but it required such precise calibration and constant maintenance that it became obsolete almost as soon as it was released, and it was left behind by smarter, quicker machines.

Twain poured around $300,000 of his own money trying to keep the Paige typesetter afloat, which is over $9 million in today’s money.

He continually dipped into the money he had earned from his books and even his wife’s family inheritance to keep dying machine afloat.

But at the end of his all for nought, even his publishing company struggled to turn a profit, and things got so bad between that, they had to shutter their Connecticut home and set up meagre accommodations in Europe.

Sometime in the 1890s, Twain struck up a friendship with the mercurial inventor, Nikola Tesla. Tesla was residing in New York City at the time, and Twain often visited the metropolis, especially after he got wind of some of the amazing inventions that Tesla was concocting.

Tesla was a scientist, Westinghouse at the time and was working on a new kind of electric motor. Twain was a frequent visitor to Tesla’s lab and loved interacting with his new gadgets and devices.

One such device Tessler was creating involved a vibrating oscillator machine, which was basically an engine that put out high frequencies.

Tesla wondered if there could be any health benefits that could be gained from the invention and knew that his friend Mark Twain sometimes suffered from digestive problems and constipation.

Twain got on the machine and instantly felt sensations of vitality until such time that the machine rattled his balls and after to effectively cure him, Twain and Tessler continued their friendship for years.

Tesla reportedly tried out on X-ray gun and shotted Twain’s head. Tessla was invited to Twain’s daughter’s wedding.

Hank Morgan, the time-travelling character in Twain’s a Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s court, may have been based on the eccentric Tesla.

Twain had to embark on a worldwide tour of lectures to try and get the family back into profit.

In 1896 Twain’s 24-year-old daughter, Susie was visiting their Connecticut home town when she was struck with meningitis. Sadly, she died from the honest, and Mark Twain never returned to the place where his greatest love and fortunes have flowered, citing the pain of her death there is too much to bear.

Dwayne didn’t even return to the United States until 1900 when he moved to New York City.

It was a period of deep, dark depression and despair for Twain; his writing was reflecting the darker side of humanity and focusing its barbs at the failures of government and disappointment in humanity in general.

He even publicly insulted Winston Churchill before introducing him at an event he began to be seen as a traitor of sorts.

And many of his works during this time weren’t even properly released until after his death when public opinion on him had come back around.

Another unavoidable subject regarding Twain was his use of racial slurs and some of his work, most notably The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Sure, these types of words were, unfortunately, very common in the pre-Civil War era that the novel was set in. But it often leads to schools and institutions banning the book outright or limiting its readings in more modern times.

Mark Twain moved to Manhattan, New York City, not long after his daughter, Susie, passed away from meningitis in 1903 His beloved wife, Olivia, took ill, so Twain moved them to Italy for a time where she eventually died the next year.

He then went in the breeze for a bit, moving back to New York City and eventually back to the state of Connecticut In Reading.

In 1906 a close friend of his and all their home and possessions destroyed in the infamous San Francisco earthquake, Twain offered to autographs and portrait of himself to raise money to help and even had the new portrait of himself commissions.

He began to Penn chapters of his autobiography, showing that he was beginning to think of his own legacy and how the world should see him now that he was becoming aware that his own life was nearing its end.

Also in 1906, he started a club, the young Girls, perhaps owing to the loss of his own daughter. Dubbed the Angel Fish and Aquarium Club and consisting of females aged 10 to 16 Twain called the starting of his foundation his life’s chief delight.

They exchanged letters and went to plays and other social gatherings together, even befriended 11-year-olds named Dorothy Quick on an ocean voyage he remained close to until his last days.

Twain didn’t have the same prolific literacy output in his last years that he did when he was younger, 1890 three’s Puddin head. Wilson dealt with the familiar idea of where two people switch positions and were hastily released to keep him from going completely broke.

The bankruptcy did rear its ugly head the next year, and Twain had to resort to doing articles for periodicals and reviews in newspapers to try and scrape together some funds.

Once Olivia died, he began to release some works from his past that hadn’t met her Muster when she was alive.

Besides being the love of his life, she had obviously proven to be quite the editor for his famous works. Once that partnership was missing, the quality and tone were a lot more cynical.

His autobiography was even a difficult venture for him, as he thought it would be more entertaining to skip around time, periods of his life, which is likely why frustrated historians have to wait 100 years after Twain’s death to release it.

But that’s exactly the length of time Mark Twain wanted. So maybe he was laughing from beyond the grave.

There were many ups and many downs. Clara, his middle daughter, was married in 1909 but then his youngest daughter, Jean, died the same year from an epileptic seizure.

It was enough to break the man nearly, and he swore he would never write another word again. After the tragedy, he instead took his bitter feelings out on the world that he saw around him.

He believed that America was overstepping its bounds on a global scale, and he vehemently spoke out against the war in the Philippines.

And yes, of course, he still put pen to paper, so to speak. He released a novella, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyberg fictional piece dealing with the evils that humans can create went left to their own devices.

And the sins of vanity letters from Earth came soon after a scathing rebuke of religion in which Satan condemns the way humans blindly worship.

One particularly striking passage goes. He prays for help on favour and protection every day on does it with hopefulness and confidence to.

Although no prayer of his has ever been answered, Twain still had trouble adjusting to life without the love of his family, and so look for brief connections whenever he could find them.

He befriended local farmers and hosted parties for the big names of the time, like Helen Keller, who he actually bestowed the famous nickname of the miracle worker.

His humour, dark as it was by this time, extended even to his own approaching passing when rumours of his demise would swirl around it.

Be quick to jokes that the report of my death was an exaggeration. When talk of his last moments arose, he was contemplated.

A distinguished man should be as particular about his last words as he is about his last breath. He should write them out on a slip of paper and take the judgment of his friends on them.

He should never leave such a thing to the last hour of his life and trust to an intellectual spurt at the last moment to enable him to say something smart with his last ist gasp and launch into eternity with grandeur.

In 1835 Haley’s comet burst through the night sky on its closest known approach. Mark Twain was born two weeks after when the famous comet was set to make its next passed in 1910.

Twain had big plans. He truly believed he was meant to come into the world with the comment on, then to leave it on the next go around, and he did Monday after it passed Earth.

The two unaccountable freaks, as he remarked, came in and went out together. Mark Twain put a special emphasis on the importance of one’s last words he didn’t fail to deliver.

While on his deathbed, he first pointed to a stack of unfinished Britain works and uttered to his biographer Throw away.

He then held the hands of his last remaining daughter, Claire, and during a short goodbye spoke if we meet famous last words indeed.

Mark Twain Quotes