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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z


MUSIC

I have learned that there lies dormant in the souls of all men a penchant for some particular musical instrument, and an unsuspected yearning to learn to play on it, that are bound to wake up and demand attention some day. Therefore, you who rail at such as disturb your slumbers with unsuccessful and demoralizing attempts to subjugate a fiddle, beware! for sooner or later your own time will come.
- "A Touching Story of George Washington's Boyhood"
Sam and his guitar
Illustration of Sam and his guitar
from St. Nicholas, January 1916

Twain at the piano
Twain at the piano
with daughter Clara and friend

Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh.
- Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927


All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out.
- autograph for Stefan Czapka, quoted in Our Famous Guest, Mark Twain in Vienna, Carl Dolmetsch

When you want genuine music--music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth's pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,--when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!
- "Enthusiastic Eloquence," San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 6/23/1865


Mark Twain's orchestrelle.
Postcard from the Dave Thomson collection.
For more on the orchestrelle,
see related article in
Mechanical Music Digest

Also see quotes on Jubilee Singers and Polk Miller.

Recommended CD:
John Davis CD

Halley's Comet: Around the Piano With Mark Twain & John Davis

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