Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:
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SAN FRANCISCO
| San Francisco is a city of startling events. Happy is the man whose
destiny it is to gather them up and record them in a daily newspaper!
That sense of conferring benefit, profit and innocent pleasure upon
one's fellow-creatures which is so cheering, so calmly blissful to the
plodding pilgrim here below, is his, every day in the year. When he
gets up in the morning he can do as old Franklin did, and say, "This
day, and all days, shall be unselfishly devoted to the good of my fellow-creatures
-- to the amelioration of their condition -- to the conferring of happiness
upon them -- to the storing of their minds with wisdom which shall fit
them for their struggle with the hard world, here, and for the enjoyment
of a glad eternity hereafter. And thus striving, so shall I be blessed!"
- letter to the Territorial Enterprise, dated Dec. 23, 1865 |
 AI image created by R. Kent Rasmussen |
 Mark Twain about 1862 from a pen and ink sketch in the WASHINGTON POST, June 17, 1894. |
To a Christian who has toiled months and months in Washoe; whose
hair bristles from a bed of sand, and whose soul is caked with a cement
of alkali dust; whose nostrils know no perfume but the rank odor of
sage-brush -- and whose eyes know no landscape but barren mountains
and desolate plains; where the winds blow, and the sun blisters, and
the broken spirit of the contrite heart finds joy and peace only in
Limburger cheese and lager beer -- unto such a Christian, verily the
Occidental Hotel is Heaven on the half shell. He may even secretly
consider it to be Heaven on the entire shell, but his religion teaches
a sound Washoe Christian that it would be sacrilege to say it. I have done more for San Francisco than any other of its old residents.
Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I
could have done more -- I could have gone earlier -- it was suggested. |
|
Now I hate to tell such a plain truth, but I must -- the bulk of
San Francisco's liberality seems sometimes actuated by a love of applause.
She don't always take kindly to a good deed for a good deed's sake,
but pat her on the head, and flatter her, and say Bully, bully, bully,
is the great Metropolis of the Pacific, and she will break her neck
trying to accomplish that good deed. You get Dr. Bellows to glorify
her princely liberality in ten telegraphic sentences, at forty cents
a word, and down they come with $20,000 for the Sanitary Fund! They
always respond when 'Glory' calls but they are sometimes slow to respond
when they are not going to be applauded. |
| For all the folks who
may have landed on this page seeking the source of the quote:
"The coldest winter I ever saw was the summer I spent
in San Francisco." However, a similar passage was written in regard to the city of Paris, France |
From LIFE magazine, Aug. 9, 1883 |
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