Mark Twain - Work Quotes

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There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage.

Mark Twain
All dentists talk while they work. They have inherited this from their professional ancestors, the barbers.

Mark Twain
When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause.

Mark Twain
Wherefore, I beseech you let the dog and the onions and these people of the strange and godless names work out their several salvations from their piteous and wonderful difficulties without help of mine, for indeed their trouble is sufficient as it is, whereas an I tried to help I should but damage their cause the more and yet mayhap not live myself to see the desolation wrought.

Mark Twain
Suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind - your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work.

Mark Twain
Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'

Mark Twain
My interest in my work dies a sudden and violent death when the work is done.

Mark Twain
No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.

Mark Twain
Intellectual work is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.

Mark Twain
When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.

Mark Twain
What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.... The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.... When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.

Mark Twain
The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are 'no account,' go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them-if the people you go among suffer by the operation.

Mark Twain
Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

Mark Twain
I am a great & sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, & all His works must be contemplated with respect.

Mark Twain
No one doubts—certainly not I—that the mind exercises a powerful influence over the body. From the beginning of time, the sorcerer, the interpreter of dreams, the fortune-teller, the charlatan, the quack, the wild medicine-man, the educated physician, the mesmerist, and the hypnotist have made use of the client's imagination to help them in their work. They have all recognized the potency and availability of that force. Physicians cure many patients with a bread pill; they know that where the disease is only a fancy, the patient's confidence in the doctor will make the bread pill effective.

Mark Twain
You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

Mark Twain
The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work.

Mark Twain
The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works.

Mark Twain
You may say organize, organize, organize; but there may be so much organization that it will interfere with the work to be done.

Mark Twain
Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.

Mark Twain
Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest works of God where is the ignoblest?

Mark Twain
We haven't all had the good fortune to be ladies; we haven't all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground.

Mark Twain
Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.

Mark Twain
Work consists of whatever a body is OBLIGED to do, and... Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.

Mark Twain
In October 1866 I broke out as a lecturer, and from that day to this I have always been able to gain my living without doing any work; for the writing of books and magazine matter was always play, not work. I enjoyed it; it was merely billiards to me.

Mark Twain
When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.

Mark Twain
It [the press] has scoffed at religion till it has made scoffing popular. It has defended official criminals, on party pretexts, until it has created a United States Senate whose members are incapable of determining what crime against law and the dignity of their own body is—they are so morally blind—and it has made light of dishonesty till we have as a result a Congress which contracts to work for a certain sum and then deliberately steals additional wages out of the public pocket and is pained and surprised that anybody should worry about a little thing like that.

Mark Twain
All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the "elect" have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it. I brought away a copy from Salt Lake. The book is a curiosity to me, it is such a pretentious affair, and yet so "slow," so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print. If Joseph Smith composed this book, the act was a miracle — keeping awake while he did it was, at any rate. If he, according to tradition, merely translated it from certain ancient and mysteriously-engraved plates of copper, which he declares he found under a stone in an out-of-the-way locality, the work of translating was equally a miracle, for the same reason.

Mark Twain
A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and -nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stock snuggles into your heart in the same way.

Mark Twain
Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done.

Mark Twain