We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to
be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be
no heroes.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
We admire them, we envy them, for great qualities which we ourselves lack. Hero
worship consists in just that.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography
One can be a hero to other folk, and in a sort of vague way understand it, or
at least believe it, but that a person can really be a hero to a near and familiar
friend is a thing which no hero has ever yet been able to realize, I am sure.
-Mark Twain's Autobiography
To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's
composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self in private.
- The Gilded Age
Heroine: girl in a book who is saved from drowning by a hero and marries him
next week, but if it was to be over again ten years later it is likely she would
rather have a life-belt and he would rather have her have it.
Hero: person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for
it.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927
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