On Timing

“I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one”
-Mark Twain

The difference between a million dollar idea and the worthless boasts of a crank is like the difference between a great joke and a terrible one -timing.

On the Value of Education

“Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.”
-Mark Twain

The better the education, the more you know what you don’t know – unless you’re too stupid. Then you know everything.

On Finally Being at Rest

“Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old, and weary, and broken of heart, whose burdens be heavy upon them, and who would lie down and be at rest.” 
-Mark Twain

Lying down in peace, knowing that the burdens of this life have been fulfilled, the wrongs committed released, the injuries suffered healed. To finally, at last, rest with an unburdened soul. 

That is perhaps the best we can hope for.

On Being Truly Virtuous

“The weakest of all weak things is a virtue that has not been tested in the fire.”
-Mark Twain

It’s one thing to act virtuously and not know any better, quite another to remain so when aware of the options.

On the Illusion of Original Thought

“We are nothing but echoes. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own, we are but a compost heap made up of the decayed heredities, moral and physical.”
-Mark Twain

We may believe that we’ve whistled a new tune or scratched out a new phrase more beautiful or clever than anyone thought to do before. We are but fooling ourselves and have only to thank all who have gone before us, throughout the long eons of time, for such foolishness.

On Abraham Lincoln

Mark Twain on Lincoln: He was the man for his times.“It was no accident that planted Lincoln on a Kentucky farm, half way between the lakes and the Gulf. The association there had substance in it. Lincoln belonged just where he was put. If the Union was to be saved, it had to be a man of such an origin that should save it. No wintry New England Brahmin could have done it, or any torrid cotton planter, regarding the distant Yankee as a species of obnoxious foreigner.

It needed a man of the border, where civil war meant the grapple of brother and brother and disunion a raw and gaping wound. It needed one who knew slavery not from books only, but as a living thing, knew the good that was mixed with its evil, and knew the evil not merely as it affected the negroes, but in its hardly less baneful influence upon the poor whites. It needed one who knew how human all the parties to the quarrel were, how much alike they were at bottom, who saw them all reflected in himself, and felt their dissensions like the tearing apart of his own soul.

When the war came Georgia sent an army in gray and Massachusetts an army in blue, but Kentucky raised armies for both sides. And this man, sprung from Southern poor whites, born on a Kentucky farm and transplanted to an Illinois village, this man, in whose heart knowledge and charity had left no room for malice, was marked by Providence as the one to “bind up the Nation’s wounds.”
-Mark Twain, New York Times, January 13, 1907

On Christmas, Remembrance, and Healing

Hallmark Snow Village Christmas ornament issued in 1989.“The xmas holidays have this high value: that they remind Forgetters of the Forgotten, & repair damaged relationships.”
– Mark Twain, from a letter to Carlotte Welles, December 30, 1907

Christmas, the holiday season, is, at its best, a time of remembering who and what is important. A time of healing.

Merry Christmas to the forgetters, the forgotten, and all who believe in our power to heal all the ills, hatreds, and misfortunes that at times plague us all.

Image Credit: TwainQuotes.com

On Watching Your 401k Too Closely

“He is now fast rising from affluence to poverty.”
-Mark Twain

Unmatched is the speed with which all illusions of growing affluence disappear into oblivion.

Don’t look. It won’t make you any richer.