16 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
  2. Dec 2024
    1. “There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

      Mark Twain's verbiage on combinatorial creativity: "mental kaleidoscope".

      As quoted from 1906 in the 1912 in the third volume of Mark Twain: A Biography: The Personal and Literary Life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens by Albert Bigelow Paine


      quote and verification via Quote Investigator at https://quoteinvestigator.com/2024/05/08/new-idea/

  3. Nov 2024
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  6. May 2024
  7. Sep 2023
  8. www.ingeniousink.co.uk www.ingeniousink.co.uk
    1. https://www.ingeniousink.co.uk/frog

      “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” - Mark Twain

      Frogs are tasks that you’ve been putting off for a long time which somehow never get around to.

      Is the Twain attribution true?

  9. Jun 2023
  10. Oct 2022
  11. Sep 2022
    1. “Substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them.”Mark Twain
  12. Jan 2022
    1. Only recently has "memory training" become a butt of ridicule and a refuge of charlatans.

      Daniel Boorstin indicated in 1984 that "'memory training' had become the butt of ridicule and a refuge of charlatans", a concept which had begun by the 1880s with people selling memory tricks and training to the point that the journal Science published an article by George S. Fellows exposing an expensive program by Antoine Loisette, which had been advertised in the New York Times with quotes by Mark Twain. #

      The trend probably hit its peak when huckster and convicted fraudster Kevin Trudeau marketed audiocassette tapes of his "Mega Memory" course on late night infomercials until he was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in the late 1990's.

      That history had begun to shift with the rise of memory sports and competitions into the early 2000s and popularized by Tyler Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein.

  13. Nov 2021
    1. None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try. - Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar
  14. Oct 2020
    1. In 1887, Twain crossed paths with Professor Loisette a ‘memory doctor’ who made a living peddling a system of memory techniques bearing his name. Inductees into the “Loisette system” were sworn to secrecy, and charged the modern equivalent of five hundred dollars to learn the “natural laws of memory” which the doctor claimed to have discovered. Twain enrolled in a several-week-long course and at first was deeply impressed, even going so far as to publish a testimonial in favour of the Loisette system.
    2. In 1885, he patented “Mark Twain’s Memory Builder: A Game for Acquiring and Retaining All Sorts of Facts and Dates.”
    1. Christian Nestell Bovee often receives credit for the quote. “Kindness: a language which the dumb can speak and the deaf can understand,” he wrote in his 1857 book “Thoughts, Feelings, and Fancies.”
  15. Jan 2018
    1. Looking at this text from Chapter 9 of Huckleberry Finn, think about voice and diction choices. Mark and comment on places where you see Twain building Huck's character through his observations and specific word choices. You might note a word that is unusual or particularly apt or a sentence that you think works or does not.