Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Twain

Twain takes a polite-sounding rule of etiquette and turns it into a trapdoor joke about human selfishness. On the surface, it reads like a gentlemanly reminder: let the ball finish its journey; don’t interfere. But the punchline is baked into the timing. “While they are still rolling” implies you absolutely may pick up the ball once it stops. Sportsmanship, in this formulation, isn’t moral character; it’s merely patience with a stopwatch.

That’s classic Twain: he doesn’t rail against dishonesty with sermons, he lets hypocrisy indict itself by adopting its own language. The line mimics the faux-virtuous tone of a club-house maxim, then reveals the club’s true ethic: decorum as camouflage. Golf, already a game obsessed with rules, scorekeeping, and self-policing, becomes the perfect stage for Twain’s broader suspicion that “respectability” often functions as a loophole-rich operating system for vice.

The subtext is social, not just sporty. Twain wrote in an America inventing new forms of leisure alongside new forms of status. Golf, imported and domesticated by the well-to-do, carried an aura of refinement. Twain punctures that aura by suggesting the difference between a gentleman and a thief is not principle but sequencing. He’s also teasing the way communities enforce norms: you’re not condemned for taking what isn’t yours, only for being seen doing it too soon. The joke lands because it’s a one-line anatomy lesson in how people retrofit ethics to convenience.