Life's Pleasures Quote by Mark Twain

Twain turns self-control into a vaudeville gag: the “rule” is airtight, logically pristine, and morally useless. “As an example to others” is the first twist of the knife. He pretends to offer public-spirited guidance while immediately confessing he “care[s]” nothing for moderation. The posture is familiar Twain: adopting the voice of the respectable counselor, then letting it collapse under the weight of his own appetites.

The joke works because it mimics the era’s earnest reform rhetoric - temperance leagues, health tracts, Victorian self-improvement - and swaps in a principle so narrow it can’t possibly challenge behavior. Never smoke when asleep? Congratulations: you’ve solved a problem no one has. Never refrain when awake? Suddenly the “rule” becomes a permission slip disguised as discipline. Twain is lampooning the human talent for constructing ethical systems that flatter our desires while preserving the performance of virtue.

There’s also a sly technical elegance: the two clauses create a neat binary, asleep/awake, as if life can be managed with a switch. That simplification is the satire. It suggests that rules are often less about changing habits than about narrating them - turning compulsion into character, addiction into identity, indulgence into a kind of principled consistency.

In context, Twain’s public persona thrived on puncturing sanctimony. This line isn’t just about smoking; it’s about the American instinct to moralize in ways that never require sacrifice, then call it wisdom.