Life and Existence

Life is doubt,

[Christian nations are the most enlightenedand progressive] in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in child-birth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve.

God made man, without man’s consent, andmade his nature, too; made it vicious instead of angelic, and then said, Be angelic, or I will punish you and destroy you. But no matter, God is responsible for everything man does, all the same; He can’t get around that fact.There is only one Criminal, and it is not man.

[ On the Bible :] It is full of interest. It hasnoble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.

Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.

There is no God, no universe, no humanrace, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought —a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlornamong the empty eternities!

There is no God, no universe, no humanrace, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought —a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlornamong the empty eternities!

Let me make the superstitions of a nationand I care not who makes its laws or its songs either.

He saw nearly all things as through a glass eye, darkly.

Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by you only regret that you didn’t see him do it.

When I reflect upon the number ofdisagreeable people who I know have gone to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life.

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

I reckon I got to light out for the Territoryahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’sgoing to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’tstand it. I been there before.

I thought a minute, and says to myself, holdon,—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now?No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the sameway I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?

[ Deleted dedication of Twain’s book RoughingIt:] To the Late Cain, This Book is Dedicated, Not on account of respect for his memory, for it merits little respect; not on accountof sympathy with him, for his bloody deedplaced him without the pale of sympathy, strictly speaking; but out of a mere humancommiseration for him in that it was hismisfortune to live in a dark age that knew notthe beneficent Insanity Plea.

The serene confidence which a Christian feels in four aces.

Having looked the past in the eye, having asked for forgiveness and having made amends, letus shut the door on the past—not in order to forget it but in order not to allow it to imprison us.

I don’t adopt any one’s ideas; I have my own.

[ After the death of President Franklin D.Roosevelt :] When they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.

Not only does democracy make everyman forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens to the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

There are, at the present time, two great nations in the world, which seem to tend towards the same end, although they started from different points: I allude to the Russians and the Americans. . . . Their starting-point is different, and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

Democratic nations care but little for whathas been, but they are haunted by visions of what will be; in this direction their unbounded imagination grows and dilates beyond all measure. . . . Democracy, which shuts the past against the poet, opens the future before him.

Revolution . . . ran its course from city to city, and the places which it arrived at last, fromhaving heard what had been done beforecarried to a still greater excess the refinementof their inventions, as manifested to thecunning of their enterprises and the atrocityof their reprisals. Words had to change theirordinary meaning and to take that which wasnow given them.

As for adopting the ways which the State has provided for remedying the evil, I know notof such ways. They take too much time, and aman’s life will be gone. I have other affairs toattend to. I came into this world, not chiefly tomake this a good place to live in, but to live init, be it good or bad.