Mark Twain Said What?!?
It’s likely that if you’ve ever been on Goodreads, other book sites, or random quotation sites, you’ve seen this quote:
“The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and starting on the first one.”
It’s attributed to Mark Twain like so many other things he never said or wrote. And these lines are ubiquitous on the Internet despite the fact that they’re usually lifeless, dull, mechanical, and not remotely witty. Some are greeting-card worthy, like this one that only appeared as a Twain quote in the 1970s: “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”
Twain is a magnet for these inspirational/feel-good/stress-reducing quotes because even tin-eared folks might realize that similar wisdom couldn’t have originated with Shakespeare. Or Moses. Those guys wrote a really long time ago.
When you find a quote that sounds bogus and consider posting it somewhere, it’s worth checking out the erudite, entertaining, well-researched website Quote Investigator. It’s editor has quite a lot to say about the history of the “getting ahead” quote:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/?s=The+secret+of+getting+ahead+is+getting+started.
Why are Twain are Kafka, Einstein, and Churchill continual crap magnets? As Philomena Cunk noted in her special Cunk on Fame, “When you need to say something pedestrian, the smart movie is attaching it to a famous person to make you sound clever.”*
Lev Raphael is a 1st-generation American who’s seen his work appear in 15 languages. His 27 books span genres from memoir to mystery and he has done hundreds of invited talks and readings in 9 different countries.
Image by Jackie Ramirez from Pixabay
*I made that up
Reciting a presumed quote from a famous writer--Twain, Hemingway, Vonnegut--seems to have become a substitute for reading the author's books. Readers will find plenty of pithy comments in their works.
Now & then I look up a quote or saying origin and might find a deep dive into the various parts which seem to have been said by someone specific but which were later somehow edited, added to, compressed. A famous one is the Churchillian "blood, sweat, & tears," which originated as "blood, toil, tears, and sweat" in one of his speeches. Or, at least, that's how I remember it from sources I can't recall!