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Who really said it

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time

Written by Mark Twain 1835–1910 · American novelist, humorist & lecturer
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Twain wrote it, and the wording checks out. It stands as the second of two “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar” epigraphs heading Chapter VI, “Swimming in Glory,” of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) — and he liked it enough to use it again, in the narrator’s voice, in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

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“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time” Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time. — Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), epigraph to Chapter VI, from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"

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Provenance

The source, on the page

Work
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
First published
Serialized in The Century Magazine, 1893–1894; book edition, American Publishing Company, Hartford, 1894
Where in the text
Second of two “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar” epigraphs heading Chapter VI, “Swimming in Glory”
Reused by Twain
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Book I, chapter 6 — in the narrator’s voice, spelled “coaxed downstairs”

CHAPTER VI. Swimming in Glory.

Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.

Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. Chapter VI epigraphs

Chapter VI opens with two Calendar entries; the habit line is the second. Transcription as printed in the 1894 text.

1897 American Publishing Company printing, scanned
Read the epigraph in the 1897 scan
Project Gutenberg — The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894)

How we checked it

Public domain

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson was first published in 1893–1894 — serially in The Century Magazine, then as a book from the American Publishing Company in 1894 — far earlier than the 1931 US copyright cutoff, so the text is in the public domain. The original 1894 copyright was registered to Olivia L. Clemens and to the Century Company for the serial; both expired long ago.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

The line is Twain’s. Most versions of it are not.

This is the rarer case: a genuine Twain sentence that still gets quoted wrong almost everywhere. Within two years of publication the verb had already been swapped, and each rewriting bred more. Quote Investigator’s verdict is narrow and worth honouring — Twain earns credit for the version with “flung,” and only that one.

The “tossed out the window” version Later rewrite

“A bad habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time” ran under Twain’s name in Coronet in 1948; Reader’s Digest reprinted a near-identical “tossed” version in 1958, dropping the word “bad,” and from there it passed into the quotation books. Twain never wrote “tossed” — Quote Investigator traces the drift ↗.

The “throw” and “thrown” versions Faulty memory

Mabel Thatcher Wellman’s 1896 article in Education gave it as “No man is strong enough to throw habit out of the window, it must be coaxed step by step down stairs”; Ellen H. Richards printed another “throw” variant in 1900, and John Harvey Kellogg in 1915 had habits that “cannot be taken by the heels and neck and thrown down stairs, but must be coaxed down, a step at a time.” All are reconstructions from memory ↗, not Twain’s text.

Twain, cited to nothing at all No citation

The line usually circulates as a bare “— Mark Twain,” which is exactly why readers get suspicious: the enquiry that prompted QI’s investigation ↗ came from someone who could find no solid citation behind the popular wording. The real citation is a chapter epigraph, and it is easy to check.

Twain wrote it — with flung, and coaxed down-stairs a step at a time — as a “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar” epigraph to Chapter VI of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) ↗, and used it a second time in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

Context

Why a calendar wrote Twain’s best lines

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson is a courtroom novel about switched babies and fingerprints, but the thing readers actually carried away was the furniture: every chapter opens with an entry from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar,” a fictional almanac kept by the town’s resident misunderstood genius. It let Twain publish a book of aphorisms inside a novel without anyone calling it a book of aphorisms.

Chapter VI gets two of them, back to back — the undertaker joke, then the habit line. Put together they are the whole Twain method in eight inches of type: a gag about dying well, then a genuinely useful piece of advice about self-improvement, delivered as a physical comedy of a man wrestling something heavy toward a staircase. It is not “quit your bad habits.” It is a description of how quitting actually feels.

Twain slipped a book of aphorisms inside a novel and let a fictional almanac take the credit.

Read the full story

He reused it, which is the strongest internal evidence that he rated it. A year later, in Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, the narrator — Joan’s page and secretary — resolves to stop lying to her, and then immediately opens with a small lie anyway, “for habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” The aphorism becomes a joke at the narrator’s own expense.

Note the drift in that one word across printings: “down-stairs” in the 1894 Calendar epigraph, “down stairs” in the 1895 Harper’s serialization of Joan of Arc, and “downstairs” in the Gutenberg text of the book. That tiny instability is the crack the later rewritings widened.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Change Growth Character

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Investigator: the full tracingquoteinvestigator.com

Dates the earliest instance to the January 1894 Century Magazine installment (quote page 334), tracks the “throw / thrown / tossed” rewritings from 1896 to 1980, and concludes Twain earns credit only for the “flung” wording.
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson — full textgutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg’s transcription of the 1894 American Publishing Company edition; the line is the second Calendar epigraph under “CHAPTER VI. Swimming in Glory.”
An 1897 American Publishing Company printing (OCR text)archive.org

The Internet Archive catalogue dates this item 1894, but its own title page reads 1897 — the American Publishing Company printing that pairs the novel with Those Extraordinary Twins, carrying the 1894 Olivia L. Clemens copyright notice. Its page text carries the epigraph and the “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar” attribution line as printed.
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1gutenberg.org

Twain’s second use of the sentence, inside the narration of Book I, chapter 6 — here spelled “coaxed downstairs.”
Wikiquote: Pudd’nhead Wilsonen.wikiquote.org

Lists the line under Ch. 6 of the novel — though even here the wording is given as “coaxed downstairs one step at a time,” not the printed “down-stairs a step at a time.”
Wikipedia: Pudd’nhead Wilsonen.wikipedia.org

Background on the novel and confirmation that it was serialized in The Century Magazine in 1893–1894 before book publication in 1894.

The true author

Who was Mark Twain?

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · American novelist, humorist & lecturer

Samuel Langhorne Clemens wrote as Mark Twain, a riverboat pilot’s call turned into the most recognisable byline in American letters. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) made him famous; the aphorism made him quotable, and he sharpened one-liners with the same care he gave a chapter. That gift is exactly why he is now the internet’s most magnetic false attribution — but this particular line really is his, in print, and easy to check.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Twain, Mark. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson. Hartford, CT: American Publishing Company, 1894. Epigraph to chapter 6, from “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.” First published serially in The Century Magazine 47, no. 3 (January 1894): 334.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/habit-is-habit-and-not-to-be-flung-out-of-the-window-by-any/

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