Mark Twain Quotes San Francisco

SAN FRANCISCO

Marking Twain most 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 merely the rank aroma of sage-castor -- and whose optics know no landscape just 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 Sky on the half shell. He may fifty-fifty secretly consider information technology to be Heaven on the entire shell, but his organized religion teaches a sound Washoe Christian that it would be sacrilege to say information technology.
- letter to the Territorial Enterprise, June 1864

San Francisco is a city of startling events. Happy is the man whose destiny information technology is to assemble them upwardly and record them in a daily newspaper! That sense of conferring benefit, profit and innocent pleasance upon 1'southward beau-creatures which is so cheering, so calmly blissful to the plodding pilgrim here below, is his, every day in the yr. When he gets up in the morning he can do as former Franklin did, and say, "This day, and all days, shall be unselfishly devoted to the good of my swain-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 difficult globe, here, and for the enjoyment of a glad eternity hereafter. And thus striving, so shall I be blest!"
- letter to the Territorial Enterprise, dated Dec. 23, 1865

At present I hate to tell such a apparently truth, but I must -- the bulk of San Francisco'due south liberality seems sometimes actuated by a love of applause. She don't e'er take kindly to a practiced deed for a expert human action's sake, only pat her on the caput, and flatter her, and say Groovy, swell, corking, is the corking Metropolis of the Pacific, and she volition suspension her neck trying to accomplish that skillful deed. Y'all get Dr. Bellows to glorify her princely liberality in ten telegraphic sentences, at forty cents a word, and down they come with $twenty,000 for the Germ-free Fund! They always answer when 'Glory' calls but they are sometimes slow to respond when they are not going to be applauded.
- quoted in "False to Thee," San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 16 January 1866, p. two.

I have washed more for San Francisco than any other of its old residents. Since I left in that location it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have washed more -- I could have gone earlier -- it was suggested.
- undated alphabetic character quoted in Marker Twain: A Biography

For all the folks who may have landed on this page seeking the source of the quote:

"The coldest wintertime I ever saw was the summertime I spent in San Francisco."
- This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but until the attribution can be verified, the quote should non exist regarded as authentic.

Withal, a similar passage was written in regard to the city of Paris, French republic

Twain asleep & not speaking