Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it
There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Life is a subjective experience and is influenced by individual perception, while concepts of good and bad reflect our human understanding of existence.
In this quote, Mark Twain expresses a profound philosophical view on life, emphasizing that our perception shapes our understanding of reality, likening life to a vision or dream. He further posits a challenging perspective on the nature of good and evil, suggesting that if a benevolent deity existed, the world would be devoid of suffering, prompting reflection on the complexities of existence and the duality of human experience.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about the nature of reality, you might quote Twain to emphasize the subjective experience of life.
More from Mark Twain
All quotes →The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement.
You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident.
In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language.
Similar quotes
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
I won't undertake war until I have tried all the arts and means of peace.
I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumblebee. I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weathercock, or the north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw, or the first spider in a new house.
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.
Murray said, ´I don´t trust anybody´s nostalgia but my own. Nostalgia is a product of dissatisfaction and rage. It´s a settling of grievances between the present and the past. The more powerful the nostalgia, the closer you come to violence. War is the form nostalgia takes when men are hard-pressed to say something good about their country.´
Die happily and look forward to taking up a new and better form. Like the sun, only when you set in the west can you rise in the east.