Mark Twain died more than a century ago, but some of his quotes still provide valuable insights into life.
“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see”
Kindness is something that isn’t sensed through your eyes, heard through your ears or blocked by a language barrier. Words can be misconstrued and misunderstood, but you can’t dispute the power of a genuine gesture of warmth, kindness and goodwill. Compassion is simply felt.
“If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything”
People like to think of honesty as a moral imperative, but Twain cuts through that notion with pragmatist humor. Lies are a house of cards. You have to remember what you said, who you said it to, why you said it, and under what condition you said it.
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything because the truth doesn’t depend on your memory. When you tell the truth, you free yourself of psychic worry about being exposed.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear”
Fear can stop anyone in their tracks. It’s perfectly normal to feel afraid when we’re about to do something hard or scary. Courage isn’t about not feeling uncertain. Courage is telling fear to take a back seat and keep going forward anyway. Whether we’re speaking in public or standing up for what we believe in, bravery is moving forward despite the fear we feel.
“Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with”
Joyful occasions are even better when celebrated with friends and family. The memory of our good news will last longer when we celebrate it with our loved ones. Twain knew that sorrow is best experienced alone, but joy should be shared with those who matter most to us.
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened”
Humans waste so much emotional energy psyching ourselves up for “what ifs” that may never happen at all. Twain reflects on the truly tragic nature of worrying: most things we spend our lives worrying about never happen. When we learn to stop worrying, we discover worrying doesn’t make tomorrow less sad, it also makes today sadder.
“The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up”
If we’re feeling down, we often want to curl up and just focus on ourselves and our issues. But wallowing usually makes us feel more melancholic. Twain suggests a cure that is very easy but goes against our normal instincts. Help to cheer someone else up. It’s a positive feedback loop.
“Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest”
Principled action becomes powerful because of how rare it is. Morality and decency should be our default setting, but greed, concession, and groupthink cause us to stray from what we know is right. When you act with complete integrity, you please those who love you and care about goodness, and you deeply perplex those who think everyone’s selfish and looking for cheats.
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do read it, you’re misinformed”
Traditionally credited to Twain as an indictment of 19th-century journalism, it’s even more relevant today. The phrase nails the quandary that if you pay attention to the news you’re informed, but if you listen you’ll find your head will be filled with hype, bias, and noise. We can’t fix this problem by shutting down the flow of information. Instead, we have to train ourselves to analyze what we’re being told and question its origin.
“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”
By schooling, Twain meant the studying of facts, rigid lesson plans, and memorizing information to pass tests. But education is something different. Education is curiosity and reading books that fuel your imagination; it’s experience and learning from your mistakes; it’s asking questions and learning how things work.
“A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval”
You can garner as much external validation, compliments, applause, and recognition as you’d like. However, it will never take the place of your own respect. If you feel that you’re worthless, you can win the lottery and become President of the United States, but it still won’t matter. Why? Because you’ll feel guilty and ashamed inside. Every second of every day you are with you, so your opinion of yourself is the most important opinion in the world.
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started”
The root cause of procrastination is that something feels too big to bite off. If we focus on how much work has to happen to change our life, or complete a large project, we get overwhelmed and freeze up. So Twain suggests that the best way to go ahead is simply to take the first step.
“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it”
Twain uses the imagery of someone stomping on a flower. The flower will still spray perfume on the shoe that crushed it. When you stay angry, you allow someone else’s wrongdoings to affect you. When you forgive, you take the high road and let someone else’s sinfulness stain them, not you.
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