Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.

Every chapter of the novel opens with one or two entries from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, the ‘whimsical almanac’ with ‘a little dab of ostensible philosophy, usually in ironical form’ that David Wilson keeps for his own amusement; when Judge Driscoll reads some of them to the leading citizens of Dawson’s Landing, they take them ‘in the solidest earnest’ as proof that Wilson is a fool (chapter V). This entry and ‘Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs a step at a time’ head the chapter in which the Italian twins, lodgers of the widow Patsy Cooper, charm her family at breakfast and the whole town at a reception. Twain liked the line: he wrote it again in a notebook in 1904, as ‘Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry’ (Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1935, p. 392).

Live so well that even the one man who profits from your death would be sorry to see you go. It is a joke, but it carries a real wish to be missed.

• ShortenedLet us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. The shorter form, which Twain himself wrote in a notebook in 1904 (Mark Twain’s Notebook, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, Harper, 1935, p. 392, seen in the archive.org scan).

Life, Death, Time, Wisdom, Meaning of life

• Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.
• Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden.
• Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive. Elbert Hubbard
• When angry, count four; when very angry, swear.
• The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. (paraphrase)

• en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mark_Twain
• archive.org/details/MarkTwainsNotebook

Mark Twain, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Chapter VI (“Swimming in Glory”), epigraph from Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. Spoken by Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/even-the-undertaker-will-be-sorry/ (31 October 2026).

Have a different wording, or a source we missed? Check it or submit it.

Do you hold the rights to anything on this page? Tell us.