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[1] - [2] PinkMonkey.com-MonkeyNotes-A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain 
PinkMonkey® Quotations on . . . A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's CourtBy
Mark Twain
QUOTATION: How empty is theory in the presence of fact! QUOTATION: A jackass has that kind of strength, and puts it to a useful
purpose, and is valuable to the world because he is a jackass; but a nobleman
is not valuable because he is a jackass. It is a mixture that is always
ineffectual, and should never have been attempted in the first place.
And yet, once you start a mistake, the trouble is done and you never know
what is going to come of it. QUOTATION: Knighterrantry is a most chuckleheaded trade, and it is tedious
hard work, too, but I begin to see that there is money in it, after all,
if you have luck. Not that I would ever engage in it, as a business, for
I wouldn’t. No sound and legitimate business can be established on
a basis of speculation. A successful whirl in the knighterrantry line—now
what is it when you blow away the nonsense and come down to the cold facts?
It’s just a corner in pork, that’s all. QUOTATION: Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of
a man, he has struck bottom, I reckon; there is no lower deep for him.
QUOTATION: All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding,
no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody
talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that
will succeed, must begin in blood. QUOTATION: Well, I had gone and spoiled it again, made another mistake.
A double one in fact. There were plenty of ways to get rid of that officer
by some simple and plausible device, but no, I must pick out a picturesque
one; it is the crying defect of my character. QUOTATION: There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently
about “the working classes,” and satisfy themselves that a day’s
hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day’s hard manual
toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay.... As far as I’m
concerned, there isn’t money enough in the universe to hire me to
swing a pickaxe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual
work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down—and I will
be satisfied, too.... The law of work does seem utterly unfair—but
there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment
the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, too. QUOTATION: My heart got to thumping. You can’t reason with your
heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect
scorns. QUOTATION: We have no thoughts of our own: they are transmitted to us,
trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable
or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a
cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited
from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to
the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so
tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. And as for me,
all that I think about in this plodding sad pilgrimage, this pathetic
drift between the eternities, is to look out and humbly live a pure and
high and blameless life, and save that one microscopic atom in me that
is truly me: the rest may land in Sheol and welcome, for all I care. QUOTATION: It was only just words, words,—they meant nothing in
the world to him, I might just as well have whistled. Words realize nothing,
vivify nothing to you, unless you have suffered in your own person the
thing which the words try to describe. [1] - [2] |
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