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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

WEALTH

...being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be. It's just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time.
-The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

We like to read about rich people in the newspapers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed.
- Mark Twain in Eruption

How unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant.
- Open Letter to Commodore Vanderbilt, 1869

What is the chief end of man?--to get rich. In what way?--dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one only and true? Money is God. God and Greenbacks and Stock--father, son, and the ghost of same--three persons in one; these are the true and only God, mighty and supreme...
- "The Revised Catechism" 9/27/1871

Clemens in tophat

Eskimo maiden
Illustration by Dan Beard from
Cosmopolitan, November 1893

Since a hundred million dollars in New York and twenty-two fish-hooks on the border of the Arctic Circle represent the same financial supremacy, a man in straitened circumstances is a fool to stay in New York when he can buy ten cents' worth of fish-hooks and emigrate.
- "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance"

For the historical context regarding the inspiration behind Twain's story "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance" this book is recommended:
Inuit Entertainers 		Mora illustration
Illustration by F. Luis Mora for "The Esquimau Maiden's Romance" for the Autograph Edition of The Writings of Mark Twain (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1903).


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