26 quotations, each verified against its source and credited to the work it comes from — the wording as Mark Twain wrote or said it, not as the internet passes it around. Page 1 of 2.
How these quotes were checked
Mark Twain is the most misattributed writer in English: when an American sentence is funny and nobody knows who wrote it, it becomes his. The lines in this collection are verified against the books themselves — The Innocents Abroad, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Following the Equator in their complete texts — or against the documented print record.
Two of the internet's favorite “Twain” lines belong to other people, and his most famous real quip is almost always misquoted. All three cases are documented below.
A sentence linked to Mark Twain may be exact, shortened, remembered by someone else, or unsupported. Each label below explains what the available evidence actually proves.
The earliest known appearance of this saying is Maurice Switzer's 1907 book Mrs. Goose, Her Book. No version appears anywhere in Twain's writings, and the attribution to him arrived later and stuck because it sounds like him.
The novelist and essayist Grant Allen published this maxim in 1894 and repeated it in at least three of his novels. The earliest attribution to Twain appears in 1907, with no source in Twain's own writings.
What Twain actually wrote, in a note to the journalist Frank Marshall White in 1897, was plainer: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” Newspapers added “greatly” within days, and his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine later embellished it to “grossly exaggerated.” The joke is real; the famous wording is not his.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.
The report of my death was an exaggeration.
Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.
If you tell the truth you don't have to remember anything.
You can't pray a lie
All right, then, I'll go to hell
What do you call work?
The truth is always respectable.
This book is a record of a pleasure trip.
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness
I am an American. I was born and reared in Hartford, in the State of Connecticut—anyway, just over the river, in the country.
“Bridgeport?” said I, pointing. “Camelot,” said he.
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years
What this folk needed, then, was a Reign of Terror and a guillotine, and I was the wrong man for them.
The question as to whether there is such a thing as divine right of kings is not settled in this book. It was found too difficult.
He sleepeth now—and shall sleep thirteen centuries. I am Merlin!
I wanted to say a Yankee mechanic's say against monarchy and its several natural props
It may have happened, it may not have happened: but it COULD have happened.
The world is made wrong; kings should go to school to their own laws, at times, and so learn mercy.
Then shall the king’s law be law of mercy, from this day, and never more be law of blood!
To crack nuts with!
I do not know you, woman!
And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows!
Every book with a quote collection of its own, each line verified against the text.
Almost. In 1897, answering a rumor that he was dying in London, he wrote: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” The word “greatly” was added by newspapers retelling the story, and “grossly exaggerated” came from his biographer after his death.
No. The earliest appearance of that saying is Maurice Switzer's 1907 book Mrs. Goose, Her Book, and nothing like it appears in Twain's writings.
No. Grant Allen, a British novelist and essayist, published the maxim in 1894 and reused it for years; it was first pinned on Twain in 1907.
From the conclusion of The Innocents Abroad (1869): “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.” The next sentence continues the thought: broad views cannot be acquired “by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
Mostly from two books: each chapter of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) opens with a maxim from “Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar,” and Following the Equator (1897) continues the device as “Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.” “Courage is resistance to fear” and “Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.” are both chapter headings.
Yes — it is an entry in the notebook he kept in 1894, published in Mark Twain's Notebook in 1935.
The sources below are the editions, archives, and full-text searches used to verify the quotations on this page. Every line was checked against one or more of them before it appeared here.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mark Twain page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mark Twain page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mark Twain page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mark Twain page.
Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Mark Twain page.
Verification is the point of this collection: a quotation is listed only when its wording has been checked against the sources above, and the attribution notes record what each check found about the famous lines that failed.
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