Life & Wisdom Quote by Mark Twain

Mark Twain turns a familiar social irritation into a scalpel: the way explanation can become a performance that obscures rather than clarifies. On its face, the line is a complaint about confusion. Underneath, it’s an indictment of the explainer. The “more” isn’t neutral effort; it’s accumulation, the piling on of words until language stops being a bridge and starts being fog. Twain’s joke is that understanding is supposed to increase with information, yet here it declines - a neat reversal that exposes how often “clarifying” is really about control, ego, or evasion.

The intent lands in Twain’s favorite territory: puncturing pretension. He lived in a culture drunk on expert talk, moral lectures, political bromides, and the kind of grandiloquent reasoning that could justify almost anything. When someone keeps explaining, Twain implies, it’s often because the idea is shaky, the motives are suspect, or the speaker is hiding behind complexity. The line flatters the listener’s instincts: if your gut says it doesn’t add up, don’t let verbosity bully you into compliance.

It also catches a psychological truth: real understanding tends to arrive as compression, not expansion. Good explanations simplify without condescending; bad ones multiply terms, disclaimers, and exceptions until they start to sound like a con. Twain’s cynicism is brisk but democratic: if the story can’t be told plainly, maybe it isn’t true - or maybe it’s not meant to be understood at all.