This one's one of the many that never passed the sniff test for me, because... well... it just doesn't sound like Twain. But thinking through WHY it doesn't "sound like him" -- a pretty weak argument -- I realized there are both syntactic and semantic "smoking guns." This syntax was not often used by Twain. In fact, from a usage perspective, it's a very contemporary construction (The [solution] is to [do something]). In a quick and admittedly cursory scan of Twain texts, I found it very rarely, and never with such raw simplicity. More significantly, Twain rarely based his humor or his carefully written (and rewritten and rewritten) "words of wisdom" on such trite orthographic word play. I won't say he never did, but I couldn't find any examples I could point to as being even remotely similar. There are several troubling semantic issues as well. First, the notion that there is a "secret of success" is quite modern. In Twain's day, at least for the "working class," conventional wisdom attributed success to hard work, not some secret that one need only discover. Second, Twain often poked fun at this and any notion that success could be achieved through any noble effort. One of his favorite ways to make us laugh was to associate success with sheer incompetence: "All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then Success is sure." -- Notebook, 1887 Twain did say something very similar in meaning to one of the primary semantic components of the quote: "What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it." -- "A Humorist's Confession," The New York Times, 11/26/1905 But the brightest red flag, I think, is raised by the quote's association of enjoyable work with success. Twain never says or even implies -- here or anywhere else -- that finding work that is like play will lead to success. On the strength of everything we know he DID say or write about success, it seems very unlikely that he would ever have made such an association. By the way, as an aside, I did find a similar quote attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt: "It is not more vacation we need - it is more vocation." While I couldn't find any reliable source for that quote either, the attribution at least makes sense within a historical context. (All Twain quotes from TwainQuotes.com. Thank you, Barbara Schmidt!) -Dan Davis -----Original Message----- From: Mark Twain Forum [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Terry Ballard Sent: Thursday, February 23, 2012 10:34 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Re: GEICO quotes Twain I checked a little deeper and found that in Google Books this did not show up until 1986 when it appeared in a book by self-help guru Tony Robbins. After that, every repeat is after 1992, the Internet Age when quote attributions pretty much turned to mush. I agree with Gretchen that Robbins likely took this idea from Tom Sawyer and rewrote it completely. Further evidence is that it's missing from twainquotes.com, which seems to have a 100% track record for separating the wheat from the chaff. On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Gretchen Martin <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > That resembles Twain's distinction between work and play in Tom > Sawyer, Ch.= > 2: "If he [Tom] had been a great and wise philosopher, like the > writer of = this book, he would now have comprehended that Work > consists of whatever a = body is obliged to do, and that Play consists > of whatever a body is not obl= iged to do" (33). =20 > Terry Ballard Assistant Director of Technical Services for Library Systems The New York Law School 185 West Broadway, New York, NY, 10013 212-431-2106 http://www.terryballard.org Author of the forthcoming book "Google this" http://googlethisforlibraries.com "My memory has a mind of its own."