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Who really said it

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money

Written by Mark Twain 1835–1910 · American novelist, humorist & lecturer
Verified Free to reuse

This is genuine Twain, and the popular wording is exact. It is the epigraph that opens chapter 8 of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) — one of the maxims Twain attributes in-book to “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar.” The sentence appears word for word in the published text at Project Gutenberg ↗.

Last verified 4 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money” Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), chapter 8 epigraph, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar." Verified in the published text. Via Quotle.info.

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Evoking the world of Mark Twain — American novelist, humorist & lecturer. Theme: "The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The source

Work
The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson
Location
Chapter 8 epigraph — “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar”
First published
Serialized in The Century Magazine, 1893–94; published as a novel in 1894
Author
Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), 1835–1910

The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.—Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

It is necessary now, to hunt up Roxy. Chapter 8 opening

The two calendar maxims stand together at the head of chapter 8 — headed plainly “Chapter VIII” in the 1894 printing, and titled “Marse Tom Tramples His Chance” in the later editions Gutenberg and Wikisource follow — immediately above the sentence that returns the story to Roxy.

1894 edition, scanned
The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson and the Comedy Those Extraordinary Twins (American Pub. Co., 1894)
Read the full text at Project Gutenberg

How we verified it

  • Primary text. The complete novel at Project Gutenberg ↗ carries the sentence verbatim as the epigraph to Chapter VIII, “Marse Tom Tramples His Chance.”
  • Second transcription. Wikisource’s chapter 8 ↗ shows the same wording, signed “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar,” followed by a second calendar entry and the chapter’s opening line.
  • Reference index. Wikiquote’s page for the novel ↗ lists the line in its sourced quotations with the citation “Ch. 8.”
  • Period printing. A scan of the 1894 American Pub. Co. edition, digitized by Google from the New York Public Library, is available at the Internet Archive ↗.
Public domain

The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson was serialized in The Century Magazine in 1893–94 and published as a novel in 1894, so the novel and this epigraph are in the public domain in the United States, which covers everything published before 1931. A scan of the 1894 American Pub. Co. printing ↗ is freely readable, and the work was written in English, so no translation copyright applies.

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

What gets garbled

The attribution itself is sound — this really is Twain, and the popular wording is the published wording. What travels badly is everything around it: the book, the fictional frame, and, on at least one large aggregator, the author’s name.

Martin Luther King Jr. Aggregator error

Quotefancy runs the line under King’s name, welded without punctuation onto a second sentence about the silence of our friends — see the page itself ↗. The result is one run-on “quote” stitched from two sources, and only the first half has a documented home. The King half is widely but not verifiably attributed: researchers report that it appears in none of his published writings or speeches, and point to a 1986 Elie Wiesel line as the likelier ancestor (WIST collects the searches ↗). Nothing in King is the source of the Twain sentence either way — it was in print decades before he was born.

Twain speaking in his own voice Context stripped

Quote sites print it as a free-floating Twain epigram. In the book it is an entry from a fictional almanac kept by the character David “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, set above chapter 8 and signed “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar” — as Wikisource shows ↗. Twain wrote it; a character is nominally saying it.

“friendship” with a lower-case f Drifted text

Twain capitalises Friendship, which is half the mock-solemnity of the sentence. Reposts routinely flatten it — the lower-case form is what that same Quotefancy page ↗ carries.

The line is Twain’s, exactly as quoted, and its home address is the chapter 8 epigraph of The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894) — readable in full at Project Gutenberg ↗.

Context

Why it mattered

Every chapter of Pudd’nhead Wilson opens with a scrap from a calendar its title character keeps for his own amusement. In the novel the townspeople read these “playful trifles in the solidest earnest,” miss the irony completely, and conclude that Wilson is a fool — which is the joke Twain is actually telling. The friendship maxim is a small machine of that kind: four adjectives of pulpit warmth (“sweet and steady and loyal and enduring”) stacked so a six-word conditional can knock them all over.

Chapter 8 is where Roxy comes back to town and goes looking for the son she swapped in the cradle, and where he refuses her. Pairing a gag about friendship surviving everything except a loan with a chapter about a family bond collapsing on contact with money is not an accident of layout.

The setup is a sermon. The punchline is a bank statement.

About Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar

The calendar epigraphs proved more portable than the novel. Twain reused the device in Following the Equator (1897) under the heading “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar,” and a great many of the one-liners now circulating under his name are calendar entries lifted out of one book or the other — genuinely his, but written as the sayings of a character.

Chapter 8 carries a second calendar entry immediately after this one: “Consider well the proportions of things. It is better to be a young June-bug than an old bird of paradise.”

Explore

Filed under

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

Friendship Truth

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.

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson — full textgutenberg.org

Project Gutenberg's complete text; the line appears as the epigraph to Chapter VIII, "Marse Tom Tramples His Chance."
Pudd'nhead Wilson, Chapter 8en.wikisource.org

Wikisource transcription showing both calendar epigraphs verbatim above the chapter's opening lines.
Pudd'nhead Wilson — Wikiquoteen.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote's sourced list for the novel, which carries this line with the citation "Ch. 8."
1894 American Pub. Co. edition (scan)archive.org

Internet Archive item for the 1894 printing of the novel with Those Extraordinary Twins, digitized by Google from the New York Public Library.
Pudd'nhead Wilson — backgrounden.wikipedia.org

Publication history: serialized in The Century Magazine 1893–1894 and published as a novel in 1894, plus a description of the calendar epigraph device.

The true author

About Mark Twain

Mark Twain

1835–1910 · American novelist, humorist & lecturer

Mark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the Missouri-born printer, riverboat pilot and newspaperman who became the most quoted American writer of the nineteenth century. The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson — serialized in The Century Magazine in 1893–94 and published as a book in 1894 — is a courtroom novel about swapped infants, fingerprints and the absurdity of the colour line. Its chapters are headed by aphorisms from a fictional almanac, which is where this line lives.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (American Publishing Company, 1894), chapter 8 epigraph, “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar”; the novel was serialized in The Century Magazine, 1893–94.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money’?” Last verified 4 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-holy-passion-of-friendship-is-of-so-sweet-and-steady/

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