Last Wednesday Wisdom for September

On last month's road trip, Ray and I spent a couple of days in Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain and inspiration for many of his stories. The visit not only got me thinking about hometowns, but also gave us a concentrated dose of Twainisms.

Since our return, I've unearthed a few more to share with you. (I also learned that many quotes attributed to Twain were actually spoken or written by someone else. I've tried my best to verify the ones I'm including here, relying on twainquotes.com‚ a site created by Twain House friend Barbara Schmidt. So I do hope they're all authentic.) As a bonus, I'll throw in some photos of Hannibal, MO at the end.

Statue in Glascock's Landing in Hannibal of a young Mark Twain as a riverboat pilot.

Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.

​Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

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 cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

Grief can take care of itself, but to get full value of a joy you must have somebody to divide it with.

The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.

When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.

In America, we hurry--which is well; but when the day's work is done, we go on thinking of losses and gains, we plan for the morrow, we even carry our business cares to bed with us, and toss and worry over them when we ought to be restoring our racked bodies and brains with sleep. We burn up our energies with these excitements, and either die early or drop into a lean and mean old age at a time of life which they call a man's prime in Europe. When an acre of ground has produced long and well, we let it lie fallow and rest for a season; we take no man clear across the continent in the same coach he started in--the coach is stabled somewhere on the plains and its heated machinery allowed to cool for a few days; when a razor has seen long service and refuses to hold an edge, the barber lays it away for a few weeks, and the edge comes back of its own accord. We bestow thoughtful care upon inanimate objects, but none upon ourselves. What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges!

​Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more--restful.

​Honor is a harder master than the law.

We do not deal much in facts when we are contemplating ourselves.

All good things arrive unto them that wait--and don’t die in the meantime.

When we think of friends, and call their faces out of the shadows, and their voices out of the echoes that faint along the corridors of memory, and do it without knowing why save that we love to do it, we content ourselves that that friendship is a Reality, and not a Fancy--that it is builded upon a rock, and not upon the sands that dissolve away with the ebbing tides and carry their monuments with them.

View of Hannibal and the Mississippi River from Lover's Leap

Mark Twain Boyhood Home (white building) and gift shop

This house, now known as the Becky Thatcher House, is across the street from Twain's boyhood home. It was once the home of the Hawkins family, whose daughter Laura was Twain's model for Becky Thatcher.

This likeness of Becky stands beside the front door

Interior of the recently redesigned Mark Twain interpretive center

On display in the interpretive center is this model of an ambitious (but never completed) sculpture project that depicted Twain with characters from his books

Detail of the model

Twain figure and quote in boyhood home display

This quote, from Twain's memoir, Life on the Mississippi, got me thinking about my relationship to my hometown

View through WPA wall into museum garden. Beyond the garden is Grant's Drugstore

Tom & Huck statue, dedicated in 1926, is one of the earliest statues depicting fictional characters

The Mark Twain museum features displays related to Twain's books, artifacts from his life, and fifteen original Norman Rockwell paintings created in 1935 for special editions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Kids can pretend to whitewash Tom's fence at this exhibit in the museum

Throughout Hannibal, businesses capitalize on Twain's name

Twain likeness outside the brew pub

and another inside the pub

Colorful block in Hannibal's historic district

Summer evening concert on the street in front of Twain's boyhood home,