Clemens no longer kept note-books, as in an earlier time, but set down innumerable memoranda-comments, stray reminders, and the like—­on small pads, and bunches of these tiny sheets accumulated on his table and about his room.  I gathered up many of them then and afterward, and a few of these characteristic bits may be offered here.

Knee

It is at our mother’s knee that we acquire our noblest & truest & highest ideals, but there is seldom any money in them.

Jehovah

He is all-good.  He made man for hell or hell for man, one or the other —­take your choice.  He made it hard to get into heaven and easy to get into hell.  He commended man to multiply & replenish-what?  Hell.

Modesty antedates clothes

& will be resumed when clothes are no more. [The latter part of this aphorism is erased and underneath it he adds:]

Modestydied

when clothes were born.

Modesty died
when false modesty was born.

History

A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie.  Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

Morals

are not the important thing—­nor enlightenment—­nor civilization.  A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can’t do without something to eat.  The supremest thing is the needs of the body, not of the mind & spirit.

Suggestion

There is conscious suggestion & there is unconscious suggestion—­both come from outside—­whence all ideas come. 
Duels

I think I could wipe out a dishonor by crippling the other man, but I don’t see how I could do it by letting him cripple me.

I have no feeling of animosity toward people who do not believe as I do; I merely do not respect ’em.  In some serious matters (relig.) I would have them burnt.

I am old now and once was a sinner.  I often think of it with a kind of soft regret.  I trust my days are numbered.  I would not have that detail overlooked.

She was always a girl, she was always young because her heart was young; & I was young because she lived in my heart & preserved its youth from decay.

He often busied himself working out more extensively some of the ideas that came to him—­moral ideas, he called them.  One fancy which he followed in several forms (some of them not within the privilege of print) was that of an inquisitive little girl, Bessie, who pursues her mother with difficult questionings.—­[Under Appendix w, at the end of this volume, the reader will find one of the “Bessie” dialogues.]—­He read these aloud as he finished them, and it is certain that they lacked neither logic nor humor.

Sometimes he went to a big drawer in his dresser, where he kept his finished manuscripts, and took them out and looked over them, and read parts of them aloud, and talked of the plans he had had for them, and how one idea after another had been followed for a time and had failed to satisfy him in the end.