CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE LECTURER’S...

THE LECTURER’S AUDIENCE.

from A Tramp Abroad (1880)

 

  Experience & Education  

All right, class, settle down. You’re all going to enjoy the guest lecturer for today. A good deal of what he has to say on this subject can be applied to your previous lessons. Sit up straight. Take notes. Life will quiz you on this:

We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.

—“Corn-pone Opinions”

The most permanent lessons in morals are those which come, not of booky teaching, but of experience.

A Tramp Abroad (1880)

But as to this matter of education, the first thing that strikes you is how much teaching has really been done and how much is worthless cramming.

—1887 speech

The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to the heart, and seeing it done.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

It is best to prove things by experiment; then you know; whereas if you depend on guessing and supposing and conjecturing, you will never get educated.

Eve’s Diary (1905)

What you needed, I reckon, was less book-learning and more bread-and-butter learning.

The American Claimant (1892)

It is from experiences such as mine that we get our education of life. We string them into jewels or into tinware, as we may choose.

—quoted in Mark Twain: A Biography (1912)

by Albert Bigelow Paine

If you are going to find out the facts of a thing, what’s the sense in guessing out what ain’t the facts and wasting ammunition?

Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)

Supposing is good, but finding out is better.

Mark Twain in Eruption (1940)

How empty is theory in the presence of fact!

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

Opinions based upon theory, superstition, and ignorance are not very precious.

—1900 letter

Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.

The American Claimant (1892)

If there wasn’t anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out; and I don’t know but more so.

Eve’s Diary (1905)

War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas, moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull.

Life on the Mississippi (1883)

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again—and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.

Following the Equator (1897)

Learnin’ by expe’ence . . . There’s lot of such things, and they educate a person . . . Uncle Abner said that the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn’t, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn’t ever going to grow dim or doubtful.

Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)

Experience teaches us only one thing at a time—and hardly that, in my case.

—1893 letter

I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn’t know.

Life on the Mississippi (1883)

But we are all that way: when we know a thing we have only scorn for other people who don’t happen to know it.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)

Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities.

Life on the Mississippi (1883)

Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity.

The Prince and the Pauper (1881)

A man who can’t learn stands in his own light.

—“An Entertaining Article”

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

There’s many a way to win in this world, but none of them is worth much, without good hard work back of it.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896)

Inestimably valuable is training, influence, education, in right directions.

What Is Man? (1906)

Training—training is everything; training is all there is to a person.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

This was good training, persistent training; and in all arts it is training that brings the act to perfection.

Christian Science (1907)

Training is potent. Training toward higher and higher, and ever higher ideals is worth any man’s thought and labor and diligence.

What Is Man? (1906)

From the cradle to the grave, during all his waking hours, the human being is under training.

What Is Man? (1906)

There is a large improvement, then, in two years? . . . You see there is use in training. Keep on. Keep faithfully on. You are doing well.

What Is Man? (1906)

My lord, the power of training! Of influence! Of education!

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)

Training does wonderful things . . . There is nothing that training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach or below it.

—“As Regards Patriotism” essay, written about 1900

The self taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers, and besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.

—“Taming the Bicycle”

We never knew an ignorant person yet but was prejudiced.

The Innocents Abroad (1869)

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.

Following the Equator (1897)

Now then, to me university degrees are unearned finds, and they bring the joy that belongs with property acquired in that way; and the money-finds and the degree-finds are just the same in number up to date—three: two from Yale and one from Missouri University. It pleased me beyond measure when Yale made me a Master of Arts, because I didn’t know anything about art; I had another convulsion of pleasure when Yale made me a Doctor of Literature, because I was not competent to doctor anybody’s literature but my own, and couldn’t even keep my own in a healthy condition without my wife’s help. I rejoiced again when Missouri University made me a Doctor of Laws, because it was all clear profit, I not knowing anything about laws except how to evade them and not get caught. And now at Oxford I am to be made a Doctor of Letters—all clear profit, because what I don’t know about letters would make me a mutli-millionaire if I could turn it into cash.

Autobiography

By advice, I turned my attention to the Greek department. I told the Greek professor I had concluded to drop the use of the Greek written character, because it was so hard to spell with, and so impossible to read after you get it spelled. Let us draw the curtain there. I saw by what followed that nothing but early neglect saved him from being a very profane man.

—1889 speech

I ordered the professor of mathematics to simplify the whole system . . . we didn’t want any more cases of if A and B stand at opposite poles of the earth’s surface and C at the equator of Jupiter, at what variations of angle will the left limb of the moon appear to these different parties? I said you just let that thing alone; it’s plenty time to get in a sweat about it when it happens; as like as not it ain’t going to do any harm anyway.

—1889 speech

I found the astronomer of the university gadding around after comets and other such odds and ends—tramps and derelicts of the skies. I told him pretty plainly that we couldn’t have that. I told him it was no economy to go on piling up and piling up raw material in the way of new stars and comets and asteroids that we couldn’t ever have any use for till we had worked off the old stock.

—1889 speech

Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.

—“The Game”

Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It’s like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won’t fatten the dog.

—1900 speech

It is noble to teach oneself, but still nobler to teach others—and less trouble.

—1906 speech