Quotes from Life on the Mississippi

“Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“The Mississippi River towns are comely, clean, well built, and pleasing to the eye, and cheering to the spirit. The Mississippi Valley is as reposeful as a dreamland, nothing worldly about it . . . nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Whoo-oop! I'm the old original iron-jawed, brass-mounted, copper-bellied corpse-maker from the wilds of Arkansaw!—Look at me! I'm the man they call Sudden Death and General Desolation! Sired by a hurricane, dam'd by an earthquake, half-brother to the cholera, nearly related to the small-pox on the mother's side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskey for breakfast when I'm in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I'm ailing! I split the everlasting rocks with my glance, and I squench the thunder when I speak! Whoo-oop! Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's my natural drink, and the wails of the dying is music to my ear! Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!—and lay low and hold your breath, for I'm bout to turn myself loose!”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Good books, good friends and a sleepy conscience:this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“A humorous treatment of the rigid uniformitarian view came from Mark Twain. Although the shortening of the Mississippi River he referred to was the result of engineering projects eliminating many of the bends in the river, it is a thought-provoking spoof:
The Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. . . . Its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people, and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past by what had occurred in a given time in the recent past . . . what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! . . .
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. . . . There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“it is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. ”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“This creature's career could produce but one result, and it speedily followed. Boy after boy managed to get on the river. The minister's son became an engineer. The doctor's and the post-master's sons became 'mud clerks;' the wholesale liquor dealer's son became a barkeeper on a boat; four sons of the chief merchant, and two sons of the county judge, became pilots. Pilot was the grandest position of all. The pilot, even in those days of trivial wages, had a princely salary—from a hundred and fifty to two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and no board to pay. Two months of his wages would pay a preacher's salary for a year. Now some of us were left disconsolate. We could not get on the river—at least our parents would not let us.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“How solemn and beautiful is the thought, that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary—but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes after the whiskey—I mean he arrives after the whiskey has arrived; next comes the poor immigrant, with ax and hoe and rifle; next, the trader; next, the miscellaneous rush; next, the gambler, the desperado, the highwayman, and all their kindred in sin of both sexes; and next, the smart chap who has bought up an old grant that covers all the land; this brings the lawyer tribe; the vigilance committee brings the undertaker. All these interests bring the newspaper; the newspaper starts up politics and a railroad; all hands turn to and build a church and a jail—and”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“On this up trip I saw a little towhead (infant island) half a mile long, which had been formed during the past nineteen years. Since there was so much time to spare that nineteen years of it could be devoted to the construction of a mere towhead, where was the use, originally, in rushing this whole globe through in six days?”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Sir Walter Scott created rank & caste in the South and also reverence for and pride and pleasure in them. Life on the Mississippi

Don Quixote swept admiration for medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence. Ivanhoe restored it. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“It isn't as it used to be in the old times. Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. 'Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half a mile wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government has turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. Near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“We had a strong desire to make a trip up the Yazoo and the Sunflower—an interesting region at any time, but additionally interesting at this time, because up there the great inundation was still to be seen in force—but we were nearly sure to have to wait a day or more for a New Orleans boat on our return; so we were obliged to give up the project.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the Professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community; knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“The priest explained the mysteries of the faith 'by signs,' for the saving of the savages; thus compensating them with possible possessions in Heaven for the certain ones on earth which they had just been robbed of. And also, by signs, La Salle drew from these simple children of the forest acknowledgments of fealty to Louis the Putrid, over the water. Nobody smiled at these colossal ironies.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention),”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Over middle of mantel, engraving—Washington Crossing the Delaware; on the wall by the door, copy of it done in thunder-and-lightning crewels by one of the young ladies—work of art which would have made Washington hesitate about crossing, if he could have foreseen what advantage was going to be taken of it.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Thence, we drove a few miles across a swamp, along a raised shell road, with a canal on one hand and a dense wood on the other; and here and there, in the distance, a ragged and angular-limbed and moss-bearded cypress, top standing out, clear cut against the sky, and as quaint of form as the apple-trees in Japanese pictures—such was our course and the surroundings of it.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice;”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

“The voyagers visited the Natchez Indians, near the site of the present city of that name, where they found a 'religious and political despotism, a privileged class descended from the sun, a temple and a sacred fire.' It must have been like getting home again; it was home with an advantage, in fact, for it lacked Louis XIV.”
― Mark Twain, quote from Life on the Mississippi

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