Browse 10 quotations connecting Mark Twain with Attitude, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, What Is Man?, The Innocents Abroad. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, What Is Man?, The Innocents Abroad.
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.”
The aphorism mocks reformers who find other people’s behavior easier to correct than their own, using a compact reversal to expose self-exemption and misplaced certainty.
Source note: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter XV epigraph; a Calendar maxim immediately before the eggs-in-one-basket passage.
“We don’t care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.”
The food comparison mocks pretension: the problem is not merely being ordinary, but adopting an inflated estimate of one’s own status and expecting others to accept it.
Source note: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter V epigraph, introduced as a remark concerning upstarts in the Calendar sequence.
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
The epigram satirizes the irritation produced when another person’s good conduct silently exposes our own shortcomings, making moral example feel inconvenient rather than inspiring.
Source note: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter XIX epigraph; one of the Calendar maxims before the chapter.
“When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.”
The joke turns the conventional promise of a better afterlife into self-interested moral calculation: the speaker suddenly worries about spending eternity with people he already disliked.
Source note: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Calendar epigraph preceding the October speculation maxim.
“When we speak of Clive, Nelson, and Putnam as men who “didn’t know what fear was,” we ought always to add the flea—and put him at the head of the procession.”
The heroic comparison is deliberately deflated by promoting the flea above famous military figures, exposing how literalizing a cliché can make grand praise sound ridiculous.
Source note: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Calendar epigraph before the chapter section in which the flea comparison appears.
“It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.”
The prehistoric-toad complaint satirizes habitual fault-finding by imagining a critic so determined to complain that even an absurd geological objection becomes useful.
Source note: Pudd’nhead Wilson, Chapter IX epigraph; the coal complaint follows the birth-and-funeral maxim in the Calendar sequence.
“The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.”
The joke turns travel into a mirror for vanity: unfamiliar settings can expose affectation and foolishness that remain easier to overlook at home.
Source note: The Innocents Abroad, chapter on travelers adopting foreign fashions; this is Twain’s comic first-person travel narration rather than a literal rule about every traveler.
“You can’t yourself, but exterior influences can do it.”
The Old Man claims that opinions can change, but attributes the change to new evidence, conversation, study, and other influences entering from outside the individual.
Source note: What Is Man?, Old Man replying to the Young Man’s question about changing an automatic opinion; this is dialogic determinism, not neutral cognitive science.
“The moral fear of shame had risen superior to the physical fear of harm.”
The dialogue describes competing fears rather than fearlessness: social shame can become strong enough to override the immediate impulse to escape physical danger.
Source note: What Is Man?, Old Man describing the imagined timid soldier in battle; the example analyzes how one learned pressure may overpower another fear.
“We must turn out what we can; we must do our endeavor and care nothing at all when the unthinking reproach us for not turning out Gobelins.”
Within the dialogue’s deterministic framework, the practical conclusion is to use one’s actual capacities fully without measuring every effort against another person’s exceptional gifts.
Source note: What Is Man?, Old Man concluding the Shakespeare/Gobelin comparison; “Gobelins” refers to elaborate tapestry and functions as the contrast with an ordinary sewing-machine.