Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910), the American writer of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Many more lines are credited to him than can be found in his writing, which is why this page separates the two.
2 traced to a named work · 8 credited but not traced
Traced to a source 2
Each of these can be found in the work named under it.
“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.”
Mark Twain
What it means. The joke is an actual rule of practice. The distortion is licensed only after the facts exist to distort.
“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear — not absence of fear.”
Mark Twain
What it means. Courage is not a feeling but a relationship with one: you do not wait for fear to go, you learn to carry it. Twain sets it as a discipline, not a temperament.
These circulate under Mark Twain's name, but no source has been confirmed. They are listed rather than dropped, because people look for them — and marked honestly.
“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
Attributed to Mark Twain
What it means. Two of the three are unremarkable. The third is the joke, and it is also the only one that requires anything of you.
“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
Attributed to Mark Twain
What it means. The claim is about transmission. Kindness needs no shared vocabulary and no working channel — which is why it reaches people who are unreachable by argument.
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
Attributed to Mark Twain
What it means. The image is exact rather than pretty. A lightning bug produces light with no heat and no force, which is precisely what a nearly-right word does to a sentence: it illuminates without striking anything. Both words may be perfectly grammatical. Only one arrives.
What it means. It relocates the difficulty. People treat starting as the trivial prelude to the real work, when it is reliably the part that does not happen, and everything downstream is blocked behind it.
Of the 10 lines credited to Mark Twain in this collection, 2 can be traced to a named work — for example “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” (Quoted by Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea, 1899). The other 8 are widely credited but have not been traced, and are marked attributed.
Did Mark Twain Say “Reports of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated”?
He said something like it — but shorter, and better. The famous wording was polished by others.
Was Mark Twain a real name?
No. Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who was born in 1835 and died in 1910.