Familiarity breeds contempt—and children.

A private note, not published in his lifetime: an entry among the maxims he jotted down in his notebook early in 1894, between a remark on newspapers that pay themselves compliments and one on a mendicant who passes the hat. Paine, who edited the notebooks, remarks there that ‘a good many of his maxims were used in Pudd’nhead Wilson, then in course of publication’; this one was not. A later entry (p. 345) turns the same proverb another way: ‘Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it.’

The proverb says that knowing someone too well breeds contempt; Twain adds that it breeds children too.

• Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect. (paraphrase)
• I used to be Snow White, but I drifted. Mae West
• 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.
• Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
• Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive. Elbert Hubbard

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

Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Notebook, prepared for publication with comments by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 237. Checked at Quotogeny, https://quotogeny.com/q/familiarity-breeds-contempt-and-children/ (21 October 2026).

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