Quotes · Quote card
Quotation from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
“He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain”
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 2 (1876 text)
The moral of the whitewashing episode, after Tom has tricked his friends into paying to do his chore.
Citation: "He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain" — Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 2 (1876 text). (id the-adventures-of-tom-sawyer-q2)
Portrait: MarkTwain.LOC, Unknown author, Public domain.
