Life's Pleasures Quote by Mark Twain

A perfect little Twain grenade: it detonates the moment you realize the speaker is bragging about a “rule” that costs him absolutely nothing to follow. The joke isn’t just that you can’t smoke while sleeping; it’s that humans love to dress inevitabilities up as virtue. Twain turns self-control into a farce, exposing how easily moral language becomes a vanity project.

The line works because it mimics the posture of earnest self-improvement. “I make it a rule” carries the stiff, pious cadence of Victorian propriety, the kind of phrase used to announce discipline, temperance, character. Then Twain yanks the rug with “while I’m sleeping,” converting the whole performance into an absurd technicality. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of a politician touting a courageous stand on gravity.

Subtextually, it’s a jab at the social rituals of respectability: the public-facing habit of announcing principles not to change one’s behavior, but to broadcast one’s supposed superiority. Twain also needle-points the era’s fixation on manners and reform movements, where “rules” proliferated as a kind of status marker. By choosing smoking, he adds a sly wink at vice itself; the speaker wants credit for restraint without surrendering the indulgence.

Twain’s intent is less about smoking than about the comedy of self-justification. He’s reminding you that hypocrisy isn’t always grand and sinister; sometimes it’s small, ridiculous, and wrapped in the language of virtue. That’s his specialty: puncturing moral seriousness with a pin, then watching the whole balloon collapse.