“Pessimist: the optimist who didn’t arrive”
-Mark Twain
Just showing up requires a level of optimism that the true pessimist is unwilling to give.
On How to Spot a Pessimist
Reply
Author Archives: founder
On Pride’s Downfall
“Human pride is not worth while; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it”
-Mark Twain, Following the Equator
Pride is a tricky thing. It can be a fine thing, too, like pride for work, family, community, and the accomplishments of others.
But pride only for the sake of itself, without humility, is sure to be humiliated. Best to carry the humility with you from the start.
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 Blowing Smoke
“It is a talent by itself to pay compliments gracefully and have them ring true. It is an art in itself.”
– Mark Twain, speech, “The Lost Lotos Club”
You da’ man… No you da’ man…
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 Seizing the Day
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
-Mark Twain
To all there comes but once chance at each day, and then the opportunity to live it to its fullest is gone. For most, regret is of lost opportunities, not mistaken actions. Seize the day!
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
“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