Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Mark Twain, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Mark Twain quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 2534 Mark Twain quotes for you to read and share.

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But soft you, the fair Ophelia: Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws, But get thee to a nunnery - go! -- Mark Twain
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Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. -- Mark Twain
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And I urge upon you this - which I think is wisdom - if you find you can't make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don't you go. -- Mark Twain
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Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW is only a small step and quickly taken. -- Mark Twain
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To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours. -- Mark Twain
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Tell the truth or trump-but get the trick. -- Mark Twain
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There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Fenimore Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now. -- Mark Twain
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Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church. -- Mark Twain
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The choir always tittered and whispered all through service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was, now. It was a great many years ago, and I can scarcely remember anything about it, but I think it was in some foreign country. -- Mark Twain
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And so when I couldn't stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. -- Mark Twain
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She turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout and arrest his flight. -- Mark Twain
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History has tried hard to teach us that we can't have good government under politicians. Now, to go and stick one at the very head of the government couldn't be wise. -- Mark Twain
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We like a man to come right out and say what he thinks- if we agree with him. -- Mark Twain
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We never read the full explanatory surroundings of marvelously exciting things when we have no occasion to suppose that some irresponsible scribbler is trying to defraud us; we skip all that, and hasten to revel in the blood-curdling particulars and be happy. -- Mark Twain
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Twenty-four years ago I was strangely handsome; in San Francisco in the rainy season I was often mistaken for fair weather. -- Mark Twain
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I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly
except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses; never, I believe, by people. -- Mark Twain
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Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped.
-from the Prefatory -- Mark Twain
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I conceive that the right way to write a story for boys is to write so that it will not only interest boys but strongly interest any man who has ever been a boy. That immensely enlarges the audience. -- Mark Twain
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These are sad days in literature. Homer is dead. Shakespeare is dead. And I myself am not feeling at all well. -- Mark Twain
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I was sorry to have my name mentioned as one of the great authors, because they have a sad habit of dying off. Chaucer is dead, Spencer is dead, so is Milton, so is Shakespeare, and I'm not feeling so well myself. -- Mark Twain
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All great men are dead, and I'm not feeling too well myself -- Mark Twain
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A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law. -- Mark Twain
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One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it. -- Mark Twain
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Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and today -- all without seeing him. It is a long time to be alone; still, it is better to be alone that unwelcome. I had to have company -- I was made for it, I think -- so I made friends with the animals. -- Mark Twain
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There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home. -- Mark Twain
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You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear. -- Mark Twain
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It's not the good that die young, it's the lucky. -- Mark Twain
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A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back the minute it begins to rain. -- Mark Twain
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In your country and mine we should have the privilege of making fun of this kind of morality, but it would be unkind to do it here.Many of these people have the reasoning faculty, but no one uses it in religious matters. -- Mark Twain
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I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world. -- Mark Twain
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I will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religous. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performace of the pieties enjoined b ythe Church -- Mark Twain
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Tweedle dee and tweedle dum -- Mark Twain
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The right word may be effective, but no word was ever as effective as a rightly timed pause. -- Mark Twain
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A proud man is one who waits for a vacancy in the Trinity. -- Mark Twain
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I always did hate for anyone to know what my plans or hopes or prospects were-for, if I kept people in ignorance in these matters, no one could be disappointed but myself, if they were not realized. -- Mark Twain
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We slept, if one might call such a condition by so strong a name - for it was a sleep set with a hair-trigger. -- Mark Twain
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Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in. -- Mark Twain
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The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven not man's. -- Mark Twain
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Heaven is by favor; if it were by merit your dog would go in and you would stay out. Of all the creatures ever made (man) is the most detestable. Of the entire brood, he is the only one ... that possesses malice. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain. -- Mark Twain
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A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it. -- Mark Twain
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It is hard to make railroading pleasant in any country. It is too tedious. -- Mark Twain
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There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life
life's "experiences"
are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side. -- Mark Twain
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There's some human instinct which makes a man treasure what he is not to make any use of, because everybody does not possess it. -- Mark Twain
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The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco -- Mark Twain
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Then pretty soon Sherburn sort of laughed; not the pleasant kind, but the kind that makes you feel like when you are eating bread that's got sand in it. -- Mark Twain
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Now, isn't imagination a precious thing? It peoples the earth with all manner of wonders ... -- Mark Twain
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Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment. -- Mark Twain
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I was in one of the most grand attitudes I ever struck, with my arm stretched up pointing to the sun. It was a noble effect. You could see the shudder sweep the mass like a wave. -- Mark Twain
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Human nature is the same everywhere; it deifies success, it has nothing but scorn for defeat. -- Mark Twain
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The inability to forget is far more devastating than the inability to remember. -- Mark Twain
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If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else's eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive. -- Mark Twain
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If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. -- Mark Twain
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During the gold rush its a good time to be in the pick and shovel business -- Mark Twain
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All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth
including America, of course
consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty occupies a foot of land that was not stolen. -- Mark Twain
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Time and tide wait for no man. A pompous and self-satisfied proverb, and was true for a billion years; but in our day of electric wires and water-ballast we turn it around: Man waits not for time nor tide. -- Mark Twain
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At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on there clothes to keep them from being stolen. -- Mark Twain
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It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. -- Mark Twain
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I have carried a revolver; lots of us do, but they are the most innocent things in the world. -- Mark Twain
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I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me. -- Mark Twain
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My land, the power of training! Of influence! Of education! It can bring a body up to believe anything. -- Mark Twain
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Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live. -- Mark Twain
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Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest works of God where is the ignoblest? -- Mark Twain
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I found out that I was a Christian for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble. -- Mark Twain
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But there are some infelicities. Such as 'like' for 'as,' and the addition of an 'at' where it isn't needed. I heard an educated gentleman say, 'Like the flag-officer did.' His cook or his butler would have said, 'Like the flag-officer done.' You hear gentlemen say, 'Where have you been at? -- Mark Twain
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All religions issue bibles again Satan, and say the most injurious things against him, but we never hear his side. -- Mark Twain
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It is not that I believe that there are too many idiots in this world, just that lightning isn't distributed right. -- Mark Twain
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But it's awluz jis' so; people dat's sot, stays sot; dey won't look into noth'n'en fine it out f'r deyselves, en when you fine it out en tell um 'bout it, dey doan' b'lieve you. -- Mark Twain
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I reck'n I knows sense when I sees it; en dey ain' no sense in sich doin's as dat. -- Mark Twain
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I 'uz mos' to de foot er de islan' b'fo' I found' a good place. I went into de woods en jedged I wouldn' fool wid raffs no mo', long as dey move de lantern roun' so. I had my pipe en a plug er dog-leg, en some matches in my cap, en dey warn't wet, so I 'uz all right. -- Mark Twain
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Out of the depths of my happy heart wells a great tide of love and prayer for this priceless treasure that is confided to my lifelong keeping. You cannot see its waves as they flow toward you, darling, but in these lines you will hear ... the distant beating of its surf. -- Mark Twain
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When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible ... -- Mark Twain
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Human Beings are the only animals that blush, or need to. -- Mark Twain
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There isn't time, so brief is life, for bickerings, apologies, heartburnings, callings to account. There is only time for loving, and but an instant, so to speak, for that. -- Mark Twain
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What you doin' with this gun? -- Mark Twain
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When I am king they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved. -- Mark Twain
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Don't use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent word will do. -- Mark Twain
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I freighted a leaf with a mental message for the friends at home, and dropped it in the stream. But I put no stamp on it and it was held for postage somewhere. -- Mark Twain
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It's my opinion that every one I know has morals, though I wouldn't like to ask. I know I have. But I'd rather teach them than practice them any day. "Give them to others"-that's my motto. -- Mark Twain
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Often a quite assified remark becomes sanctified by use and petrified by custom; it is then a permanency, its term of activity a geologic period. -- Mark Twain
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A half-truth is the most cowardly of lies. -- Mark Twain
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It is a pity we can't escape from life when we are young. -- Mark Twain
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Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary. -- Mark Twain
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The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. -- Mark Twain
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I felt it was my duty to praise all of God's works with fervent enthusiasm. At the same time I killed flies in my house in a spirit of hatred, exasperation and contempt. My praise to God for all his works was dishonest, the act of killing the fly was honest. -- Mark Twain
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This nation is like all the others that have been spewed upon the earth
ready to shout for any cause that will tickle its vanity or fill its pocket. What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!
- Letter to J. H. Twichell, 1/29/1901 -- Mark Twain
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I love to hear myself talk, because I get so much instruction and moral upheaval out of it. -- Mark Twain
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Wheresoever she was, there was Eden. -- Mark Twain
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One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect. -- Mark Twain
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In Boston they ask, how much does he know? In New York, how much is he worth? In Philadelphia, who were his parents? -- Mark Twain
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Tell me about a person's family, friends, and community, and I'll tell you what his opinions are. -- Mark Twain
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When I'm playful I use the meridians of longitude and parallels of latitude for a seine, and drag the Atlantic Ocean for whales. I scratch my head with the lightning and purr myself to sleep with the thunder. -- Mark Twain
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Suddenly the nickel-clad horse takes the bit in its mouth and goes slanting for the curbstone defying all prayers and all your powers to change its mind - your heart stands still, your breath hangs fire, your legs forget to work. -- Mark Twain
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The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires. -- Mark Twain
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I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him. -- Mark Twain
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First get the facts, you can distort them later -- Mark Twain
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It is hard enough luck being a monarch, without being a target also. -- Mark Twain
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Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more. -- Mark Twain
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It is a good thing to write for the amusement of the public, but it is a far higher and nobler thing to write for their instruction, their profit, their actual and tangible benefit. -- Mark Twain
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If we read the words and attitudes of the past through the pompous "wisdom" of the considered moral judgments of the present, we will find nothing but error. -- Mark Twain
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If there wasn't anything to find out, it would be dull. Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out; and I don't know but more so. -- Mark Twain
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There is only one expert who is qualified to examine the souls and the life of a people and make a valuable report - the native novelist ... And when a thousand able novels have been written, there you have the soul of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had. -- Mark Twain
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Don't live in the past, don't ponder about the future, stay at the PRESENT moment NOW ... always. -- Mark Twain
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The principle of give and take is the principle of diplomacy - give one and take ten -- Mark Twain
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The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner. -- Mark Twain
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I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, -- Mark Twain
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Mark Twain describes how his friend Ralph Keeler introduced him at the start of a lecture: 'I don't know anything about this man. At least I know only two things; one is, he hasn't been in the penitentiary, and the other is (after a pause, and almost sadly), I don't know why. -- Mark Twain
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Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion. -- Mark Twain
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Sometimes you gwyne to git hurt, en sometimes you gwyne to git sick; but every time you's gwyne to git well agin. -- Mark Twain
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It would 'a' been a miserable business to have any unfriendliness on the raft; for what you want, above all things, on a raft, is for everybody to be satisfied, and feel right and kind towards the others. -- Mark Twain
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One of life's most over-valued pleasures is sexual intercourse; of one of life's least appreciated pleasures in defecation. -- Mark Twain
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Of course, there are many rich men in the empire, but their money is buried, and they dress in rags and counterfeit poverty. -- Mark Twain
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If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence; but if you are "no account," go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them -- Mark Twain
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Reality can be beaten with enough imagination. -- Mark Twain
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I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself. -- Mark Twain
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It is better to give than receive- especially advice. -- Mark Twain
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The Mississippi River towns are comely, clean, well built, and pleasing to the eye, and cheering to the spirit. The Mississippi Valley is as reposeful as a dreamland, nothing worldly about it ... nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon. -- Mark Twain
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If we never lied , there would be nothing to remember. -- Mark Twain
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Simple rules for saving money: To save half, when you are fired by an eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait and count to forty. To save three quarters, count sixty. To save all, count sixty-five. -- Mark Twain
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Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment; but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute. -- Mark Twain
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We have a criminal jury system which is superior to any in the world and it's efficiency is only marred by the difficulty of finding twelve men every day who don't know anything and can't read- -- Mark Twain
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The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race's steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit's way - the optimist's way. -- Mark Twain
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I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it's never happened yet. -- Mark Twain
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To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master. -- Mark Twain
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I am a great and sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, and all His works must be contemplated with respect. -- Mark Twain
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It's considered good sportsmanship not to pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling. -- Mark Twain
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A baby is an angel whose wings decrease as his legs increase. -- Mark Twain
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Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. -- Mark Twain
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In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him. -- Mark Twain
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The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal; the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend is immortal -- Mark Twain
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A jury of inquest was impaneled, and after due deliberation and inquiry they returned the inevitable American verdict which has been so familiar to our ears all the days of our lives - "NOBODY TO BLAME. -- Mark Twain
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We chase phantoms half the days of our lives. It is well if we learn wisdom even then, and save the other half. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing like instances to grow hair on a bald-headed argument. -- Mark Twain
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The truth is a precious commodity. That's why I use it so sparingly. -- Mark Twain
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When a prisoner of style escapes, it's called an evasion. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing so annoying as having two people talking when you're busy interrupting. -- Mark Twain
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Obscurity and a competence - that is the life that is best worth living. -- Mark Twain
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Music is a good thing; and after all that soul-butter and hogwash, I never see it freshen up things so, and sound so honest and bully. -- Mark Twain
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Is not this insanity plea becoming rather common? Is it not so common that the reader confidently expects to see it offered in every criminal case that comes before the courts? ... Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. -- Mark Twain
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Then the cow asked:
"What is a mirror?"
"It is a hole in the wall," said the cat. "You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy. -- Mark Twain
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Love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes-none knows whence-and cannot explain itself. -- Mark Twain
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Don't wake up a woman in love. Let her dream, so that she does not weep when she returns to her bitter reality -- Mark Twain
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Out of all the things I have lost, I miss my mind the most. -- Mark Twain
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Only a government that is rich and safe can afford to be a democracy, for democracy is the most expensive and nefarious kind of government ever heard of on earth -- Mark Twain
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A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it. -- Mark Twain
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Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for. -- Mark Twain
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As it lay there with the shadows of the mountains brilliantly photographed upon its still surface I thought it must surely be the fairest picture the whole earth affords. -- Mark Twain
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Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed. -- Mark Twain
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Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please. -- Mark Twain
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Looking into the muzzle of Slade's pistol. "And the next instant," added my informant, impressively, "he was one of the deadest men that ever lived. -- Mark Twain
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The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality. -- Mark Twain
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Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down
he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down. -- Mark Twain
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The only people that a bank will loan money to is the very people who don't need it. -- Mark Twain
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Heir did go to America, with the Fairfax heir or about the same time - but disappeared - somewhere in the wilds of Virginia, got married, end began to breed savages for the Claimant -- Mark Twain
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Presently a vagrant poodle dog came idling along, sad at heart, lazy with the summer softness and the quiet, weary of captivity, sighing for change. -- Mark Twain
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Low comedies are written for the drawing-room, the kitchen and the stable, and if you cut out the kitchen and the stable the drawing-room can't support the play by itself. -- Mark Twain
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When a man arrives at great prosperity God did it: when he falls into disaster he did it himself. -- Mark Twain
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I wasn't worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two million dollars. -- Mark Twain
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The highest pleasure to be got out of freedom, and having nothing to do, is labor. -- Mark Twain
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Man is the only animal that is cruel. It kills just for the sake of it. -- Mark Twain
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My mother had a slender, small body, but a large heart-a heart so large that everybody's joys found welcome in it, and hospitable accommodation. -- Mark Twain
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Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody. -- Mark Twain
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It must be very peaceful, he thought, to lie and slumber and dream forever and ever, with the wind whispering through the trees and caressing the grass and the flowers over the grave, and nothing to bother and grieve about, ever any more. -- Mark Twain
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I wish to become rich, so that I can instruct the people and glorify honest poverty a little, like those kind hearted, fat, benevolent people do. -- Mark Twain
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None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try. -- Mark Twain
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In another moment he was flying down the street with his pail and a tingling rear, Tom was whitewashing with vigor, and Aunt Polly was retiring from the field with a slipper in her hand and triumph in her eye. -- Mark Twain
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The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large. -- Mark Twain
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I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side. -- Mark Twain
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It was not that Adam ate the apple for the apple's sake, but because it was forbidden. It would have been better for us-oh infinitely better for us-if the serpent had been forbidden -- Mark Twain
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I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly. -- Mark Twain
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He lay down upon a sumptuous divan, and proceeded to instruct himself with honest zeal. -- Mark Twain
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Yet little Tom was not unhappy. He had a hard time of it but did not know it. It was the sort of time that all the Offal Court boys had; therefore he supposed it was the correct and comfortable thing. -- Mark Twain
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God created war so that Americans would learn geography. -- Mark Twain
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What's your name?"
"Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer."
"That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?"
"Yes -- Mark Twain
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All life demands change, variety, contrast - else there is small zest to it. -- Mark Twain
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I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value
certainly no large value. -- Mark Twain
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It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that. -- Mark Twain
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What I suffered in contemplating his happiness, pen cannot describe. -- Mark Twain
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Men are more compassionate/(nobler)/magnanimous/generous than God; for men forgive their dead, but God does not. -- Mark Twain
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That kind of so-called housekeeping where they have six Bibles and no cork-screw. -- Mark Twain
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When your opinions start to coincide with those of the majority, it is time to reconsider your opinions. -- Mark Twain
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Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain
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I never can think of Judas Iscariot without losing my temper. To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature, Congressman. -- Mark Twain
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But as soon as one is at rest in this world off he goes on something else to worry about. -- Mark Twain
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Sing like no one is listening, LOVE LIKE YOU'VE NEVER BEEN HURT, dance like nobody's watcbing, and live like it's heaven on earth. -- Mark Twain
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When all else fails, write what your heart tells you. You can't depend on your eyes, when your imagination is out of focus. -- Mark Twain
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Put no trust in the benefits to accrue from early rising, as set forth by the infatuated Franklin ... -- Mark Twain
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Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. -- Mark Twain
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Name the greatest of all inventors. Accident. -- Mark Twain
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No sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon. -- Mark Twain
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It liberates the vandal to travel-you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction. -- Mark Twain
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A pilot must have a memory developed to absolute perfection. But there are two higher qualities which he also must have. He must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake. -- Mark Twain
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To avoid being drawn into error, keep a firm grip on the truth. -- Mark Twain
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We don not think, in the holy places; we think in bed, afterwards, when the glare, and the the noise, and the confusion are gone, and in fancy we revisit alone, the solemn monuments of the past, and summon the phantom pageants of an age that has passed away. -- Mark Twain
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The king he allowed he would drop over to t'other village without any plan, but just trust in Providence to lead him the profitable way - meaning the devil, I reckon. -- Mark Twain
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It is higher and nobler to be kind. -- Mark Twain
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No public interest is anything other or nobler than a massed accumulation of private interests. -- Mark Twain
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To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and much less trouble. -- Mark Twain
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It is noble to teach oneself; it is still nobler to teach others. -- Mark Twain
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There is more real pleasure to be gotten out of a malicious act, where your heart is in it, than out of thirty acts of a nobler sort. -- Mark Twain
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The old Irish when immersing a babe at baptism left out the right arm so that it would remain pagan for good fighting -- Mark Twain
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Names are not always what they seem. -- Mark Twain
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Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel; at is worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the noblest work of God. -- Mark Twain
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I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schoisched with a step peculiar to myself - and the kangaroo. -- Mark Twain
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If ever you've been down in the dumps, hear these iconic authors share with you more than their writing wisdom. -- Mark Twain
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I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released today.'
It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. -- Mark Twain
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So singularly clear was the water, that where it was only twenty or thirty feet deep the bottom was so perfectly distinct that the boat seemed floating in the air! -- Mark Twain
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When majority is insane, sane must go to asylum. -- Mark Twain
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It was with much satisfaction that I recognized the wisdom of having told this candid gentleman, in the beginning, that my name was Smith. -- Mark Twain
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One should never use exclamation points in writing. It is like laughing at your own joke. -- Mark Twain
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After a few months' acquaintance with European 'coffee' one's mind weakens, and his faith with it, and he begins to wonder if the rich beverage of home, with it's clotted layer of yellow cream on top of it, is not a mere dream after all, and a thing which never existed. -- Mark Twain
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The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage. One tells them from vinegar by the label. -- Mark Twain
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The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it he knows too little. -- Mark Twain
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There ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore. -- Mark Twain
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That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace. -- Mark Twain
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I have found out that there ain't no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them. -- Mark Twain
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Every year you wait, long ago gets farther away. -- Mark Twain
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Make your mark in New York and you are a made man. -- Mark Twain
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Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that. -- Mark Twain
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If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much. -- Mark Twain
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The equator was wisely put where it is, because if it had been run through Europe all the kings would have tried to grab it. -- Mark Twain
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So endeth this chronicle. It being strictly a history of a boy, it must stop here; the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man. -- Mark Twain
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True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god. -- Mark Twain
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God rewards gamblers and fools. The crucial thing, when you win, is knowing which you were. -- Mark Twain
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What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there! -- Mark Twain
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Don't let schooling interfere with your education. -- Mark Twain
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The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. -- Mark Twain
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Life is short, break the rules. -- Mark Twain
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A robber is more high-toned than what a pirate is - as a general thing. In most countries they're awful high up in the nobility - dukes and such. -- Mark Twain
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I don't know anything that mars a good literature so completely as too much truth. Facts contain a great deal of poetry, but you can't use too many of them without damaging your literature. -- Mark Twain
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As to the adjective: when in doubt, strike it out. -- Mark Twain
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How lovely is death; and how niggardly it is doled out. -- Mark Twain
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Man is the only religious animal. In the Holy task of smoothing his brother's path to the happiness of heaven, he has turned the globe into a graveyard. -- Mark Twain
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Why waste your money looking up your family tree? Just go into politics and your opponent will do it for you. -- Mark Twain
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As a rule, we go about with masks, we go about looking honest, and we are able to conceal ourselves all through the day. -- Mark Twain
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Well, no doubt it's a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed. -- Mark Twain
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Behind every successful man, there is a woman - And behind every unsuccessful man, there are two. -- Mark Twain
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If man could be crossed with a cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat. -- Mark Twain
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The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year. -- Mark Twain
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Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection. -- Mark Twain
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Architects cannot teach nature anything. -- Mark Twain
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That is their way, those plagues, those scientists - peg, peg, peg - dig, dig, dig - plod, plod, plod. I wish I could catch a cargo of them for my place; it would be an economy. Yes, for years, you see. They never give up. Patience, hope, faith, perseverance; it is the way of all the breed. -- Mark Twain
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Those people ... early stricken of God, intellectually - the departmental interpreters of the laws in Washington ... can always be depended on to take any reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it. -- Mark Twain
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Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And hain't that a big enough majority in any town? -- Mark Twain
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My! we couldn't get him out, Tom. And besides, 'twouldn't do any good; they'd ketch him again." "Yes - so they would. But I hate to hear 'em abuse him so like the dickens when he never done - that." "I do too, Tom. Lord, I hear 'em say he's the -- Mark Twain
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Many public-school children seem to know only two dates - 1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion. -- Mark Twain
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But we are all insane, anyway ... The suicides seem to be the only sane people. -- Mark Twain
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Time spent with your children is time wisely spent. -- Mark Twain
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So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked. -- Mark Twain
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Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms. -- Mark Twain
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All the rest of [Shakespeare's] vast history, as furnished by the biographers, is built up, course upon course, of guesses, inferences, theories, conjectures - an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts. -- Mark Twain
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Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it ... -- Mark Twain
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It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell. -- Mark Twain
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A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain. -- Mark Twain
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But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it. -- Mark Twain
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He begged hard, and said he couldn't play - a plausible excuse, but too thin; there wasn't a musician in the country that could. -- Mark Twain
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There isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting. -- Mark Twain
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Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit. -- Mark Twain
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I am opposed to millionaires, but it would be dangerous to offer me the position. -- Mark Twain
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The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise ... -- Mark Twain
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He had had much experience of physicians, and said 'the only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd druther not'. -- Mark Twain
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A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape. -- Mark Twain
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Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. -- Mark Twain
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The expeditions were often out of meat, and scant of clothes, but they always had the furniture and other requisites for the mass; they were always prepared, as one of the quaint chroniclers of the time phrased it, to 'explain hell to the savages. -- Mark Twain
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I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable. -- Mark Twain
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Do right for your own sake, and be happy in knowing that your neighbor will certainly share in the benefits resulting. -- Mark Twain
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There would be a center table, with books of a tranquil sort on it ... -- Mark Twain
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Lord save us all from old age and broken health and a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms. -- Mark Twain
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[The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. -- Mark Twain
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Each season brings a world of enjoyment and interest in the watching of its unfolding, its gradual harmonious development, its culminating graces-and just as one begins to tire of it, it passes away and a radical change comes, with new witcheries and new glories in its train. -- Mark Twain
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Each time in fiction or in history I meet a well-defined personality I am personally interested in him, for we know each other already, because we met on the river. -- Mark Twain
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To lodge all power in one party and keep it there is to insure bad government and the sure and gradual deterioration of the public morals. -- Mark Twain
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All the memories in the world, good or bad, are not worth one slender hope for the future; and -- Mark Twain
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July 4. Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so -- Mark Twain
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Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. -- Mark Twain
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I don't believe there is anything in the whole earth that you can't learn in Berlin except the German language. -- Mark Twain
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When I am come to mine own again, I will always honor little children, remembering how that these trusted me and believed me in my time of trouble; whilst they that were older, and thought themselves wiser, mocked at me and held me for a liar. -- Mark Twain
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An enemy can partly ruin a man, but it takes a good-natured injudicious friend to complete the thing and make it perfect. -- Mark Twain
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When a teacher calls a boy by his entire name, it means trouble. -- Mark Twain
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I could not really complain, because he had only given me his word of honor as security; I ought to have required of him something substantial. -- Mark Twain
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We met a great many other interesting people, among them Lewis Carroll, author of the immortal "Alice"
but he was only interesting to look at, for he was the silliest and shyest full-grown man I have ever met except "Uncle Remus. -- Mark Twain
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Pessimist: The optimist who didn't arrive. -- Mark Twain
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France has usually been governed by prostitutes -- Mark Twain
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Baccarat is a game whereby the croupier gathers in money with a flexible sculling oar, then rakes it home. If I could have borrowed his oar I would have stayed. -- Mark Twain
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In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better. -- Mark Twain
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What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash. -- Mark Twain
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Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. -- Mark Twain
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Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity? -- Mark Twain
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Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping ... you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing; you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water. -- Mark Twain
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A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer. -- Mark Twain
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All my life I have been honest-comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly-I could only lend it. -- Mark Twain
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There are two things nobody should ever have to watch being made, sausage and laws. -- Mark Twain
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The spirit of wrath - not the words - is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing. We begin to swear before we can talk. -- Mark Twain
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A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. -- Mark Twain
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You cannot have all chiefs; you gotta have Indians too.
Perfect love cannot be without equality.
A friend to everybody and to nobody is the same thing.
We are all alike, on the inside. -- Mark Twain
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The unspoken word is capital. We can invest it or we can squander it. -- Mark Twain
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He had the calm confidence of a Christian with four aces. -- Mark Twain
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If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times. -- Mark Twain
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Tom partly uncovered a dismal caricature of a -- Mark Twain
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The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. -- Mark Twain
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Well, let her - she should see that he could be as indifferent as some other people. -- Mark Twain
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We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. -- Mark Twain
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They say I work for the angels they never said I was one -- Mark Twain
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Love heightens all senses - except the common. -- Mark Twain
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It's better to be an optimist who is sometimes wrong than a pessimist who is always right -- Mark Twain
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There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. -- Mark Twain
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You can't throw too much style into a miracle. -- Mark Twain
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History never repeats itself; at best it sometimes rhymes. -- Mark Twain
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There is no accounting for human beings. -- Mark Twain
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Being rich ain't what it's cracked up to be. It's just worry and worry, and sweat and sweat, and a-wishing you was dead all the time. -- Mark Twain
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Prediction is difficult- particularly when it involves the future. -- Mark Twain
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Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life. -- Mark Twain
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We are chameleons, and our partialities and prejudices change place with an easy and blesses facility, and we are soon wonted to the change and happy in it. -- Mark Twain
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At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass -- Mark Twain
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These Sultans of the fastnesses were turbaned with tumbled volumes of cloud, which shredded away from time to time and drifted off fringed and torn, trailing their continents of shadow after them; -- Mark Twain
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Etiquette requires us to admire the human race. -- Mark Twain
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The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice. -- Mark Twain
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Don't go around thinking the world owes you a living. It was here first. -- Mark Twain
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The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. I do not know why, but such was the case. I suppose it was because I could not conceive of a small country having so large a history. -- Mark Twain
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If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape? No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love. -- Mark Twain
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I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world. -- Mark Twain
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What marriage is to morality, a properly conducted licensed liquor traffic is to sobriety. -- Mark Twain
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Tom Sawyer the Pirate looked around upon the envying juveniles about him and confessed in his heart that this was the proudest moment of his life. -- Mark Twain
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Children and fools always speak the truth. -- Mark Twain
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We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard; but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that. -- Mark Twain
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It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible. -- Mark Twain
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Being in love is like getting back to childhood. You're just happy for no reasons at all. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory. -- Mark Twain
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Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever. -- Mark Twain
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What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it ... The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all ... When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. -- Mark Twain
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Often it does seem such a pity that Noah and his party did not miss the boat. -- Mark Twain
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Mere life is a luxury, and the color of the grass, of the flowers, of the sky, the wind in the trees, the outlines of the horizon, the forms of clouds, all give a pleasure as exquisite as the sweetest music to the ear famishing for it. The -- Mark Twain
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One thing at a time, is my motto - and just play that thing for all it is worth, even if it's only tto pair and a jack. -- Mark Twain
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Whiskey is carried into committee rooms in demijohns and carried out in demagogues. -- Mark Twain
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I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble, if there were only one in the world. -- Mark Twain
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The lightning there is peculiar; it is so convincing, that when it strikes a thing it doesn't leave enough of that thing behind for you to tell whether-Well, you'd think it was something valuable, and a Congressman had been there. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing exists; all is a dream. God - man - the world - the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars - a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space - and you! -- Mark Twain
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To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else
these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial. -- Mark Twain
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There are no people who are quite so vulgar as the over-refined. -- Mark Twain
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I would much prefer to suffer from the clean incision of an honest lancet than from a sweetened poison. -- Mark Twain
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Experience teaches us only one thing at a time - and hardly that, in my case. -- Mark Twain
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I ordinarily smoke fifteen cigars during my five hours' labours, and if my interest reaches the enthusiastic point, I smoke more. I smoke with all my might, and allow no intervals. -- Mark Twain
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I saw a startling sight today, a politician with his hands in his own pockets. -- Mark Twain
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Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it. -- Mark Twain
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Principles have no real force except when one is well fed. -- Mark Twain
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Additional problems are the offspring of poor solutions. -- Mark Twain
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When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so. -- Mark Twain
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To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable - like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death. -- Mark Twain
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Tom's army won a great victory, after a long and hard-fought battle. Then the dead were counted, prisoners exchanged, the terms of the next disagreement agreed upon, and the day for the necessary battle appointed; after which the armies fell into line and marched away, and Tom turned homeward alone. -- Mark Twain
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I have never tried, in even one single little instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game
the masses. - Mark Twain, a Biography -- Mark Twain
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He had been drunk over in town, and laid in the gutter all night, and he was a sight to look at. A body would a thought he was Adam, he was just all mud. -- Mark Twain
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Mrs Kerslake:" but if there is no chance of being offered a place at Oxford, surely-?"
Simon Kerslake: "Thats not what i said Mother, I shall be an undergraduate at Oxford by the first day of term -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing more awe-inspiring than a miracle except the credulity that can take it at par. -- Mark Twain
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I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place goodbye so regretfully. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always. -- Mark Twain
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You can tell German wine from vinegar by the label. -- Mark Twain
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When I was fourteen years old, I was amazed at how unintelligent my father was. By the time I turned twenty-one, I was astounded how much he had learned in the last seven years. -- Mark Twain
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I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself. -- Mark Twain
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The good Lord didn't create anything without a purpose, but the fly comes close. -- Mark Twain
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Don't wait the time is never just right. -- Mark Twain
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Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. -- Mark Twain
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Well, I know. It's jam - that's what it is. Forty times I've said if you didn't let that jam alone I'd skin you. Hand me that switch. -- Mark Twain
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Weather is a literary specialty, and no untrained hand can turn out a good article on it -- Mark Twain
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Now let us see what the philosophers say. Note that venerable proverb: Children and fools _always_ speak the truth. The deduction is plain
adults and wise persons _never_ speak it. -- Mark Twain
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What a world of trouble those who never marry escape! There are many happy matches, it is true, and sometimes "my dear," and "my love" come from the heart; but what sensible bachelor, rejoicing in his freedom and years of discretion, will run the tremendous risk? -- Mark Twain
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It is not worth while to strain one's self to tell the truth to people who habitually discount everything you tell them, whether it is true or isn't. -- Mark Twain
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The offspring of riches: Pride, vanity, ostentation, arrogance, tyranny -- Mark Twain
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And so I am become a knight of the Kingdom of Dreams and Shadows -- Mark Twain
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Too bad that youth is wasted on the young. -- Mark Twain
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Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born
a hundred million years
and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. -- Mark Twain
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There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity's mind and were willing to reveal it. -- Mark Twain
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The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession. -- Mark Twain
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Only one thing is impossible for God: To find any sense in any copyright law on the planet. -- Mark Twain
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Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble. -- Mark Twain
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Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day. -- Mark Twain
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An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans. -- Mark Twain
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After my marriage she edited everything I wrote. And what is more, she not only edited my works, she edited me. -- Mark Twain
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Don't just sit there and worry. Be proactive. Do something - anything - about what's worrying you so you can gain information, focus and control over the situation. I've suffered a great many catastrophes in my life. Most of them never happened. -- Mark Twain
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The holy passion of Friendship is of so sweet and steady and loyal and enduring a nature that it will last through a whole lifetime, if not asked to lend money. -- Mark Twain
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If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile. -- Mark Twain
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It is no use to keep private information which you can't show off. -- Mark Twain
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He would be a consul no doubt by and by, at some foreign port, of the language of which he was ignorant; though if ignorance of language were a qualification he might have been a consul at home. -- Mark Twain
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Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first!
Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer -- Mark Twain
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MONDAY morning found Tom Sawyer miserable. Monday morning always found him so - because it began another week's slow suffering in school. He generally began that day with wishing he had had no intervening holiday, it made the going into captivity and fetters again so much more odious. -- Mark Twain
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Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull. -- Mark Twain
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I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and she said not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together. Miss -- Mark Twain
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Now, we'll start this band of robbers and call it Tom Sawyer's Gang. Everybody that wants to join has got to take an oath, and write his name in blood. -- Mark Twain
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Like it! Yes - the way I'd like a hot stove if I was to set on it long enough. No, Tom, I won't be rich, and I won't live in them cussed smothery houses. I like the woods, and the river, and hogsheads, and I'll stick to 'em, too. -- Mark Twain
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Is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual - he is a -- Mark Twain
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As usual, the fickle, unreasoning world took Muff Potter to its bosom and fondled him as lavishly as it had abused him before. But that sort of conduct is to the world's credit; therefore it is not well to find fault with it. -- Mark Twain
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I wrote 'Tom Sawyer' and 'Huck Finn' for adults exclusively, and it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. -- Mark Twain
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This ain't no thirty-seven year job, this is a thirty-eight year job, Tom Sawyer. -- Mark Twain
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I felt very good; I judged I had done it pretty neat
I reckoned Tom Sawyer couldn't a done it no neater himself. Of course he would a throwed more style into it, but I can't do that very handy, not being brung up with it. -- Mark Twain
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Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures? -- Mark Twain
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Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden. -- Mark Twain
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Looking' his last' upon the scene of his former joys and his later sufferings, and wishing 'she' could see him now, abroad on the wild sea, facing peril and death with a dauntless heart, going to his doom with a grim smile on his lips. -- Mark Twain
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When you feel like tellin a feller to go to the devil - tell him to go to Chicago - it'll anser every purpose, and is perhaps, a leetle more expensive. -- Mark Twain
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We can achieve what we can conceive and believe. -- Mark Twain
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Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven. -- Mark Twain
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Having faith is believing in something you just know ain't true. -- Mark Twain
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When red-headed people are above a certain social grade their hair is auburn. -- Mark Twain
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Public opinion is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. -- Mark Twain
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She is not refined. She is not unrefined. She keeps a parrot -- Mark Twain
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Never let your education interfere with your learning. -- Mark Twain
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To the rear, sir - he's lost his leg! -- Mark Twain
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I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; -- Mark Twain
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Occasionally, merely for the pleasure of being cruel, we put unoffending Frenchmen on the rack with questions framed in the incomprehensible jargon of their native language, and while they writhed, we impaled them, we peppered them, we scarified them, with their own vile verbs and participles. -- Mark Twain
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I had been to school most all the time, and could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five, and I don't reckon I could ever get any further than that if I was to live forever. I don't take no stock in mathematics, anyway. -- Mark Twain
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Priapism is what happens when someone gets strangulated to the point of hypoxia. -- Mark Twain
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Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away. -- Mark Twain
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Why, an' thou shouldst live a thousand years thou'dst never hear so masterful a cursing. Alack, her art died with her. There be base and weakling imitations left, but no true blasphemy. -- Mark Twain
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But who shall tell how many ages it seemed to this prisoner? -- Mark Twain
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What, warder, ho! the man that can blow so complacent a blast as that, probably blows it from a castle. -- Mark Twain
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The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal. -- Mark Twain
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Yes, always avoid violence. In this age of charity and kindliness, the time has gone by for such things. Leave dynamite to the low and unrefined. -- Mark Twain
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You can't pray a lie -- I found that out. -- Mark Twain
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Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. -- Mark Twain
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No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances. -- Mark Twain
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Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven. -- Mark Twain
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And what is a man without energy? Nothing - nothing at all. -- Mark Twain
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I've seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true. -- Mark Twain
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The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for. -- Mark Twain
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Bridgeport?" Said I.
"Camelot," Said he. -- Mark Twain
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We were surprised how closely the cuckoo imitated the clock-and yet, of course, it could never have heard a clock. -- Mark Twain
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I said it was a brutal thing.
No, it was a human thing. You should not insult the brutes by such a misuse of that word; they have not deserved it, -- Mark Twain
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If you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward. You will never get her full confidence again. -- Mark Twain
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Where a blood relation sobs, an intimate friend should choke up, a distant acquaintance should sigh, a stranger should merely fumble sympathetically with his handkerchief. -- Mark Twain
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The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect. -- Mark Twain
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A man who goes around with a prophecy-gun ought never to get discouraged: if he will keep up his heart and fire at everything he sees, he is bound to hit something by and by. -- Mark Twain
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It's not as bad as it sounds. -- Mark Twain
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The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal. -- Mark Twain
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Adam was but human - this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent. -- Mark Twain
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Bible, and so the delivery of one of these prizes was a rare and noteworthy circumstance; -- Mark Twain
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Are you an American? No, I am not an American. I am the American. -- Mark Twain
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Darwin abolished special creations, contributed the Origin of Species and hitched all life together in one unbroken procession. -- Mark Twain
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God's noblest work. Man who found it out? Man. -- Mark Twain
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I am a border-ruffian from the State of Missouri. I am a Connecticut Yankee by adoption. In me, you have Missouri morals, Connecticut culture; this, gentlemen, is the combination which makes the perfect man. -- Mark Twain
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The mere knowledge of a fact is pale; but when you come to realize your fact, it takes on color. It is all the difference between hearing of a man being stabbed to the heart, and seeing it done. -- Mark Twain
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It takes three weeks to prepare a good ad-lib speech. -- Mark Twain
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we consulted the guide-books and were rejoiced to know that there were no sights in Odessa to see; and so we had one good, untrammeled holyday on our hands, with nothing to do but idle about the city and enjoy ourselves. -- Mark Twain
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Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing so annoying as a good example!! -- Mark Twain
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It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive. -- Mark Twain
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The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell together, as quickly as possible. -- Mark Twain
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A good memory and a tongue tied in the middle is a combination which gives immortality to conversation. -- Mark Twain
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Kings cannot ennoble thee, thou good, great soul, for One who is higher than kings hath done that for thee; but a king can confirm thy nobility to men. -- Mark Twain
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A good lawyer knows the law; a clever one takes the judge to lunch. -- Mark Twain
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I was warned to stop smoking, which I did, for two or three days, but it was too lonesome, and I have resumed - in a modified way - 4 smokes a day instead of 40. This will have a good effect. On the bank balance. -- Mark Twain
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Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat. -- Mark Twain
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No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work. -- Mark Twain
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Prophecy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks. -- Mark Twain
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If I had the remaking of man, he wouldn't have any conscience. It is one of the most disagreeable things connected with a person; and although it certainly does a great deal of good, it cannot be said to pay, in the long run; it would be much better to have less good and more comfort. -- Mark Twain
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I can last two months on a good compliment. -- Mark Twain
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Manners!" he said. "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction. The castle is done. Do you like it? -- Mark Twain
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In 'Huckleberry Finn,' I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was. He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had. -- Mark Twain
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What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before. -- Mark Twain
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One ought always to lie, when one can do good by it; -- Mark Twain
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Good-bye...if we meet... -- Mark Twain
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It was a place of sin, loose women, whiskey and gambling. It was no place for a good Presbyterian, and I did not long remain one. -- Mark Twain
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I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one. -- Mark Twain
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There are several good protections against temptations, but the surest is cowardice. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing spoils a good story like the arrival of an eyewitness. -- Mark Twain
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Stars and shadows ain't good to see by. -- Mark Twain
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The catfish is Plenty good enough fish for anyone -- Mark Twain
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Good wine needs no bush; a jug is the thing. -- Mark Twain
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Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His seeing it." "But it falls, just the same. What good is seeing it fall? -- Mark Twain
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A country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab, and can't travel any way but sideways and backways. -- Mark Twain
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A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes; when bad, he is entitled to none at all. -- Mark Twain
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We have not all had the good fortune to be ladies. We have not all been generals, or poets, or statesmen; but when the toast works down to the babies, we stand on common ground - for we have all been babies. -- Mark Twain
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Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it. -- Mark Twain
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This is Huck Finn, a child of mine of shady reputation. Be good to him for his parent's sake. -- Mark Twain
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I saw men whom thirty years had changed but slightly; but their wives had grown old. These were good women; it is very wearing to be good. -- Mark Twain
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The law is a system that protects everybody who can afford to hire a good lawyer. -- Mark Twain
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The Bible has noble poetry in it ... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies. -- Mark Twain
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Be good and you'll be lonesome -- Mark Twain
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It is full of interest, it has noble poetry in it and some clever fables and some blood drenched history, some good morals and a wealth of obscenity and upwards of a thousand lies.
(Re The Bible) -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing more frustrating than a good example. -- Mark Twain
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Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature! -- Mark Twain
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Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I'm a laying up sin and suffering for us both, -- Mark Twain
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Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. -- Mark Twain
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How often we recall with regret that Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity that his intentions were good. -- Mark Twain
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Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wondering what they had found to laugh at. Dan Setchell used it before -- Mark Twain
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He was a good enough sort of cretur, and hadn't no harm in him, and was just a genius, as the papers said, which wasn't his fault. -- Mark Twain
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And whoever will take that motto and live by it will be likely to succeed. There's many a way to win, in this world, but none of them is worth much without good hard work back of it. -- Mark Twain
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In a good bookroom you feel in some mysterious way that you are absorbing the wisdom contained in all the books through your skin, without even opening them. -- Mark Twain
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A woman's intuition is better than a man's. Nobody knows anything, really, you know, and a woman can guess a good deal nearer than a man. -- Mark Twain
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No temperance society which is well officered and which has the real good of our fellow-men in view, will ever get drunk save in the seclusion of its temperance hall. -- Mark Twain
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Be good and you will be lonesome. -- Mark Twain
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How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before. -- Mark Twain
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It's a good thing for a dog to have fleas; keeps his mind off being a dog. -- Mark Twain
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Diligence is a good thing, but taking things easy is much more restful. -- Mark Twain
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Half of the results of a good intentions are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good. -- Mark Twain
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When we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it; we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones. -- Mark Twain
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I hate editors, for they make me abandon a lot of perfectly good English words. -- Mark Twain
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Warm summer sun,
shine brightly here,
Warm Southern wind,
blow softly here,
Green sod above,
lie light, lie light,
Good night, dear heart;
good night, good night. -- Mark Twain
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If books are not good company, where shall I find it? -- Mark Twain
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In other localities certain places in the streams are much better than others, but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere. -- Mark Twain
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The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man; and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him. -- Mark Twain
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It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense -- Mark Twain
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Good exercise for the heart: reach out and help your neighbor -- Mark Twain
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God puts something good and loveable in every man His hands create. -- Mark Twain
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All good things arrive unto them that wait - and don't die in the meantime. -- Mark Twain
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He put his foot on it, and lifted one of the sleeves out with his teeth, and chewed and chewed at it, gradually taking it in, and all the while opening and closing his eyes in a kind of religious ecstasy, as if he had never tasted anything as good as an overcoat before, in his life. -- Mark Twain
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None of us can be as great as God, but any of us can be as good. -- Mark Twain
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A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught. -- Mark Twain
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It does us all good to unbend sometimes. -- Mark Twain
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The exquisitely bad is as satisfying to the soul as the exquisitely good. Only the mediocre is unendurable. -- Mark Twain
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Trial by jury is the palladium of our liberties. I do not know what a palladium is, but I am sure it is a good thing! -- Mark Twain
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Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition. -- Mark Twain
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New Year's Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. -- Mark Twain
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The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost - not another man's - is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases. -- Mark Twain
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Yes, I am of old family, and not illiterate. I am a fossil." "A which?" "Fossil. The first horses were fossils. They date back two million years. -- Mark Twain
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Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories. -- Mark Twain
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I would not rob you of your food or your clothes or your umbrella, but if I caught your German out I would take it. But I don't study any more,- I have given it up. -- Mark Twain
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Behold, the fool saith, "Put not all thine eggs in the one basket" - which is but a matter of saying, "Scatter your money and your attention"; but the wise man saith, "Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET." - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar -- Mark Twain
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Inherently, each one of us has the substance within to achieve whatever our goals and dreams define. What is missing from each of us is the training, education, knowledge and insight to utilize what we already have. -- Mark Twain
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An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency. -- Mark Twain
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Ain't you my chile? En does you know anything dat a mother won't do for her chile? Day ain't nothin' a white mother won't do for her chile. Who made 'em so? De Lord done it. En who made de niggers? De Lord made 'em. In de inside, mothers is all de same. De good lord he made 'em so. -- Mark Twain
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Repartee is something we think of twenty-four hours too late. -- Mark Twain
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There is no prophecy in our day but history. But history is a trustworthy prophet. History is always repeating itself, because conditions are always repeating themselves. Out of duplicated conditions history always gets a duplicate product. -- Mark Twain
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Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy; aristocracy of the American type. -- Mark Twain
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Then she told me all about the bad place, and said I wished I was there. She got mad, then, but I didn't mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres, all I wanted was a change, I warn't particular -- Mark Twain
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Slade had to kill several men - some say three, others say four, and others six - but the world was the richer for their loss. -- Mark Twain
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When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself. -- Mark Twain
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The truth is, a person's memory has no more sense that his conscience, and no appreciation whatever of values and proportions. -- Mark Twain
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There has never been a Protestant boy nor a Protestant girl whose mind the Bible has not soiled. -- Mark Twain
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We often feel sad in the presence of music without words; and often more than that in the presence of music without music. -- Mark Twain
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He is in heaven now, and happy; or if not there, he bides in hell and is content; for in that place he will find neither abbot nor yet bishop. -- Mark Twain
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She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life. Under a grave and gentle exterior burned inextinguishable fires of sympathy, energy, devotion, enthusiasm, and absolutely limitless affection. -- Mark Twain
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Oh, they have just a bully time - take ships and burn them, and get the money and bury it in awful places in their island where there's ghosts and things to watch it, and kill everybody in the ships - make 'em walk a plank. -- Mark Twain
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Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable. -- Mark Twain
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They said they would rather be outlaws a year in Sherwood Forest than President of the United States forever. -- Mark Twain
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I am persuaded that a coldly-thought-out and independent verdict upon a fashion in clothes, or manners, or literature, or politics, or religion, or any other matter that is projected into the field of our notice and interest, is a most rare thing -- if it has indeed ever existed. -- Mark Twain
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We could use up two Eternities in learning all that is to be learned about our own world and the thousands of nations that have arisen and flourished and vanished from it. Mathematics alone would occupy me eight million years. -- Mark Twain
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THANKSGIVING DAY. Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys; they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji. -- Mark Twain
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Your friends may love you in private but your enemies will hate you in public. -- Mark Twain
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Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is. -- Mark Twain
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Too much is just enough. -- Mark Twain
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Memories which someday will become all beautiful when the last annoyance that encumbers them shall have faded out of our minds. -- Mark Twain
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I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate ... and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead. -- Mark Twain
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There's no such thing as an uninteresting life, such a thing is an impossibility. Beneath the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, a tragedy. -- Mark Twain
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There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy. -- Mark Twain
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There is no security in life, only opportunity. -- Mark Twain
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Irrevence is another person's disrespect to your god; there isn't any word that tells what your disrespect to his god is. -- Mark Twain
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But in this country we have one great privilege which they don't have in other countries. When a thing gets to be absolutely unbearable the people can rise up and throw it off. That's the finest asset we've got - the ballot box. -- Mark Twain
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I don't like to commit myself about Heaven and Hell, you see, I have friends in both places. -- Mark Twain
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I sometimes wonder if our world leaders are very smart and just putting us on, or very stupid and mean it. -- Mark Twain
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Gratitude and treachery are merely the two extremities of the same procession. You have seen all of it that is worth staying for when the band and the gaudy officials have gone by. -- Mark Twain
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A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them.
[Letter to the Millicent (Rogers) Library, February 22, 1894] -- Mark Twain
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Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often. -- Mark Twain
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The highest perfection of politeness is only a beautiful edifice, built, from the base to the dome, of graceful and gilded forms of charitable and unselfish lying. -- Mark Twain
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I make it a rule never to smoke while I'm sleeping. -- Mark Twain
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Drag your thoughts away
from your troubles ...
by the ears, by the heels,
or any other way you can manage it. -- Mark Twain
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To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the on-looking world consent to it is finer. -- Mark Twain
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Work like you don't need the money. Dance like no one is watching. And love like you've never been hurt. -- Mark Twain
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Politicians, old buildings, and prostitutes become respectable with age. -- Mark Twain
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The weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire. -- Mark Twain
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I could see he meant no offense, but in my thoughts I set it down as not very good manners.
"Manners!" he said. "Why, it is merely the truth, and truth is good manners; manners are a fiction. -- Mark Twain
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You cannot trust your eyes, if your imagination is out of focus. -- Mark Twain
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Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilt. -- Mark Twain
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Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing but that frail breastwork of earth between the people and destruction. -- Mark Twain
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In all the ages, three-fourths of the support of the great charities has been conscience money. -- Mark Twain
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Had I never loved, I never would have been unhappy; but I turn to Him who can save, and if His wisdom does not will my expected union, I know He will give me strength to bear my lot. -- Mark Twain
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What a curious kind of fool a girl is. Never been licked in school. What's a licking? -- Mark Twain
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He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel; he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed-kind of a syndicate; and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that's left over. -- Mark Twain
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Morals are an acquirement, like music, like a foreign language, like piety, poker, paralysis, no man is born with them. -- Mark Twain
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The convention missionaries call "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice. -- Mark Twain
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A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle. -- Mark Twain
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They told me the first mourner to come was the dog. He came uninvited, and stood up on his hind legs and rested his fore paws upon the trestle, and took a last long look at the face that was so dear to him, then went his way as silently as he had come. HE KNOWS. -- Mark Twain
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If horses knew their strength we should not ride anymore. -- Mark Twain
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Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant. -- Mark Twain
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Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething. -- Mark Twain
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In prayer we call ourselves 'worms of the dust', but it is only on a sort of tacit understanding that the remark shall not be taken at par. -- Mark Twain
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A new oath holds pretty well; but ... when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retryings of its remains, it ceases to be serviceable; any little strain will snap it. -- Mark Twain
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Good judgement is the result of experience and experience the result of bad judgement. -- Mark Twain
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I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won't. -- Mark Twain
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To be busy is man's only happiness. -- Mark Twain
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Among other common lies, we have the _silent_ lie
the deception which one conveys by simply keeping still and concealing the truth. Many obstinate truth-mongers indulge in this dissipation, imagining that if they _speak_ no lie, they lie not at all. -- Mark Twain
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Good breeding consists of concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person. -- Mark Twain
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There are no grades of vanity; there are only grades of ability in concealing it. -- Mark Twain
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He does not care for flowers. Calls them rubbish, and cannot tell one from another, and thinks it is superior to feel like that. -- Mark Twain
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It had not occurred to anybody in the crowd - that simple trick of inquiring about somebody who wasn't ten thousand miles away. The magician was hit hard; it was an emergency that had never happened in his experience before, and it corked him; he didn't know how to meet it. -- Mark Twain
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There was a freshness and breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and thrown away. -- Mark Twain
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History teaches us that whenever a weak and ignorant people possess a thing which a strong and enlightened people want, it must be yielded up peaceably. -- Mark Twain
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It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art ... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes ... -- Mark Twain
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To the one, nights spent in dancing had seemed made of minutes instead of hours; to the other, those selfsame nights had been like all other nights of dungeon life and seemed made of slow, dragging weeks instead of hours and minutes. -- Mark Twain
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Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience. -- Mark Twain
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Oh, there spoke the human! He is always pretending that the eternal bliss of heaven is such a priceless boon! Yes, and always keeping out of heaven just as long as he can! At bottom, you see, he is far from being certain about heaven. -- Mark Twain
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I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight. -- Mark Twain
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A raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, -- Mark Twain
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The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, -- Mark Twain
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Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money off them. -- Mark Twain
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear. -- Mark Twain
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Everything human is pathetic -- Mark Twain
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Custom is custom: it is built of brass, boiler-iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar. -- Mark Twain
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It is better to be alone than unwelcome. - Eve -- Mark Twain
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There are only two types of speakers in the world. 1. The nervous and 2. Liars. -- Mark Twain
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But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind; death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness; death was man's best friend; when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free. -- Mark Twain
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A successful book is not made of what is in it, but what is left out of it. -- Mark Twain
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An occasional compliment is necessary to keep up one's self-respect. -- Mark Twain
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Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.
Death, the refuge, the solace, the best and kindliest and most prized friend and benefactor of the erring, the forsaken, the old and weary and broken of heart. -- Mark Twain
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And last but not least, reflecting my feelings on proofreading ... excuse any pages on my websites that have misspelled words or grammatical errors ... I'm not a proofreader of any great merit. -- Mark Twain
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Braveness is resistance to concern, mastery of panic - not absense of anxiety. -- Mark Twain
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Adam was the luckiest man in the world. He had no mother-in-law. -- Mark Twain
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College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either. -- Mark Twain
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Jim he couldn't see no sense in the most of it, but he allowed we was white folks and knowed better than him; -- Mark Twain
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The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot. -- Mark Twain
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It takes me a long time to lose my temper, but once lost I could not find it with a dog. -- Mark Twain
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There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure. -- Mark Twain
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What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! -- Mark Twain
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There's always something about your success that displeases even your best friends. -- Mark Twain
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When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable. -- Mark Twain
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Now what I contend is that my body is my own, at least I have always so regarded it. If I do harm through my experimenting with it, it is I who suffer, not the state. -- Mark Twain
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In literature imitations do not imitate. -- Mark Twain
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The Creator made Italy from designs by Michelangelo. -- Mark Twain
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Citizenship is what makes a republic - monarchies can get along without it. -- Mark Twain
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To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a Negro. She was a slave, and salable as such. -- Mark Twain
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There is no regular system of taxation, but when the Emperor or the Bashaw want money, they levy on some rich man, and he has to furnish the cash or go to prison. Therefore, few men in Morocco dare to be rich. -- Mark Twain
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Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty. -- Mark Twain
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It isn't as it used to be in the old times. Then everybody traveled by steamboat, everybody drank, and everybody treated everybody else. 'Now most everybody goes by railroad, and the rest don't drink. -- Mark Twain
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When its steamboat time
you steamboat -- Mark Twain
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I do not want Michael Angelo for breakfast-but for luncheon-for dinner- for tea-for supper-for between meals. -- Mark Twain
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The government of my country snubs honest simplicity but fondles artistic villainy, and I think I might have developed into a very capable pickpocket if I had remained in the public service a year or two. -- Mark Twain
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In India, 'cold weather' is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. -- Mark Twain
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Shut the door not that it lets in the cold but that it lets out the coziness. -- Mark Twain
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I should have been glad to acquire some sort of idea of Hindu theology, ... but the difficulties were too great. -- Mark Twain
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I shall never use profanity except in discussing house rent and taxes. -- Mark Twain
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In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer. -- Mark Twain
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Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.
[Mark Twain, a Biography] -- Mark Twain
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It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth. -- Mark Twain
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It takes your enemy and your friend, working together, to hurt you to the heart: the one to slander you and the other to get the news to you. -- Mark Twain
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Well, my book is written-let it go. But if it were only to write over again there wouldn't be so many things left out. They burn in me; and they keep multiplying; but now they can't ever be said. And besides, they would require a library-and a pen warmed up in hell. -- Mark Twain
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A tax is a fine for doing well, a fine is a tax for doing wrong. -- Mark Twain
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The average American may not know who his grandfather was. But the American was, however, one degree better off than the average Frenchman who, as a rule, was in considerable doubt as to who his father was. -- Mark Twain
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It has taken a weary long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can. -- Mark Twain
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Of the 417 commandments, only a single one of the 417 has found ministerial obedience; multiply and replenish the earth. To it sinner & saint, scholar & ignoramus, Christian & savage are alike loyal. -- Mark Twain
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Everything in moderation except whiskey, and sometimes too much whiskey is just enough. -- Mark Twain
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Yes - en I's rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself, en I's wuth eight hund'd dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn' want no mo'. -- Mark Twain
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Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any. -- Mark Twain
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I persuaded him to throw the dirk away; and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself. -- Mark Twain
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A "classic" is a book that everybody praises but nobody has read -- Mark Twain
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At the beginning of that interval a type-machine was a curiosity. The person who owned one was a curiosity, too. But now it is the other way about: the person who doesn't own one is a curiosity. -- Mark Twain
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I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert
a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race. -- Mark Twain
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When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain. -- Mark Twain
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A man accustomed to American food and American domestic cookery would not starve to death suddenly in Europe, but I think he would gradually waste away, and eventually die. -- Mark Twain
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I told you this would happen. But, no, you had to go for the buffet, didn't you? -- Mark Twain
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Do the thing you fear the most and the death of fear is certain. -- Mark Twain
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My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water. -- Mark Twain
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WE ARE THE CANAANITES. WE ARE THEY THAT HAVE BEEN DRIVEN OUT OF THE LAND OF CANAAN BY THE JEWISH ROBBER, JOSHUA. -- Mark Twain
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It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail. All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure. -- Mark Twain
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James Elly Kleinman, a cousin of mine was seriously ill two or three weeks ago, in New York, but is well now. The report of my illness grew out of his illness, the report of my death was an exaggeration. -- Mark Twain
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I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead. -- Mark Twain
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Always obey your parents. When they are present. This is the best policy in the long run. Because if you don't, they will make you. Most parents think they know better than you do, and you can generally make more by humoring that superstition than you can by acting on your own better judgment. -- Mark Twain
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Learning softeneth the heart and breedeth gentleness and charity. -- Mark Twain
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The most important days in your life are the day you were born ... and the day you find out why. -- Mark Twain
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One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning. -- Mark Twain
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If I owned half of that dog, I would shoot my half. -- Mark Twain
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The Autocrat of Russia possesses more power than any other man in the earth; but he cannot stop a sneeze. -- Mark Twain
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In America-as elsewhere-free speech is confined to the dead. -- Mark Twain
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She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and "jimpson" weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and shouted: -- Mark Twain
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I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. -- Mark Twain
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It is a shameful thing to insult a child. -- Mark Twain
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We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can "show off" and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off. -- Mark Twain
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Life becomes fully understandable only the moment we realise that we are all mad. -- Mark Twain
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It is sound statesmanship to add two battleships every time our neighbour adds one and two stories to our skyscrapers every time he piles a new one on top of his to threaten our light. There is no limit to this soundness but the sky. -- Mark Twain
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Brooklyn praise is half slander. -- Mark Twain
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I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins! -- Mark Twain
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No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is. -- Mark Twain
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The best of all lost arts is honesty -- Mark Twain
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He was sunshine most always-I mean he made it seem like good weather. -- Mark Twain
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The kingly office is entitled to no respect. It was originally procured by the highwayman's methods. It remains a perpetuated crime, can never be anything but the symbol of a crime. It is no more entitled to respect than is the flag of a pirate. -- Mark Twain
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Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday. -- Mark Twain
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Jimmy Finn was not burned in the calaboose, but died a natural death in a tan vat, of a combination of delirium tremens and spontaneous combustion. When I say natural death, I mean it was a natural death for Jimmy Finn. -- Mark Twain
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Not long after, as Tom, all undressed for bed, was surveying his drenched garments by the light of -- Mark Twain
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Well, it rained mortar and masonry the rest of the week. This was the report; but probably the facts would have modified it. -- Mark Twain
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A sense of humor is the one thing no one will admit to not having. -- Mark Twain
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The world is made wrong; kings should go to school to their own laws, at times, and so learn mercy. -- Mark Twain
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Worrying is like paying a debt you don't owe. -- Mark Twain
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What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one's self-approval. -- Mark Twain
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He [George Washington Cable] has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it. -- Mark Twain
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It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race. -- Mark Twain
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It is a worthy thing to fight for one's freedom; it is another sight finer to fight for another man's. -- Mark Twain
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She kept up her compliments, and I kept up my determination to deserve them or die. -- Mark Twain
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I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. -- Mark Twain
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More than once I have been humiliated by my resemblance to God the father; He is always longing for the love of His children and trying to get it on the cheapest and laziest terms He can invent. -- Mark Twain
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I am quite sure ... I have no race prejudice, and I think I have no color prejudices, nor caste prejudices. Indeed, I know it. I can stand any society. All I care to know is that a man is a human being - this is enough for me; he can't be any worse. -- Mark Twain
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If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance. -- Mark Twain
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Never be haughty to the humble, never be humble to the haughty. -- Mark Twain
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Congressman is the trivialist distinction for a full grown man. -- Mark Twain
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I was born with Halley's Comet and I expect to die upon its return -- Mark Twain
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There was not a man in the party but believed that with a little practice he could stand in a row, especially if there were others along; -- Mark Twain
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It's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know for sure that ain't true. -- Mark Twain
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Forgiveness is the smell that lavender gives out when you tread on it -- Mark Twain
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Loyalty to a petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul. -- Mark Twain
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Herschel removed the speckled tent-roof from the world and exposed the immeasurable deeps of space, dim-flecked with fleets of colossal suns sailing their billion-leagued remoteness. -- Mark Twain
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There are only two forces that can carry light to all the corners of the globe ... the sun in the heavens and the Associated Press down here. -- Mark Twain
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I played Chess with him and would have beaten him sometimes only he always took back his last move, and ran the game out differently -- Mark Twain
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The darling mispronunciations of childhood! - dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again. -- Mark Twain
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I once sent a dozen of my friends a telegram saying 'flee at once - all is discovered.' They all left town immediately. -- Mark Twain
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S'pose a man was to come to you and say Pollyvoo-franzy - what would you think? -- Mark Twain
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Whenever he was out of luck and a little down-hearted, he would fall to mourning over the loss of a wonderful cat he used to own (for where women and children are not, men of kindly impulses take up with pets, for they must love something) -- Mark Twain
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It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. -- Mark Twain
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Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. -- Mark Twain
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The soul and substance of what customarily ranks as patriotism is moral cowardice
and always has been. -- Mark Twain
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I'll give you a marvel. -- Mark Twain
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If there was two birds sitting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first. -- Mark Twain
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he hoped she would be happy, and never regret having driven her poor boy out into the unfeeling world to suffer and die. -- Mark Twain
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Do something everyday that you don't want to do; this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain. -- Mark Twain
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I'm glad I did it, partly because it was worth it, but mostly because I shall never have to do it again -- Mark Twain
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Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions. -- Mark Twain
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Hi-YI! YOU'RE up a stump, ain't you! -- Mark Twain
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It is easier to manufacture seven facts than one emotion. -- Mark Twain
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Information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious otter of roses out of the otter. -- Mark Twain
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But it is a blessed provision of nature that at times like these, as soon as a man's mercury has got down to a certain point there comes a revulsion, and he rallies. Hope springs up, and cheerfulness along with it, and then he is in good shape to do something for himself, if anything can be done. -- Mark Twain
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Man is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight -- Mark Twain
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Who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it? -- Mark Twain
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The average American's simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak. -- Mark Twain
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The devil's aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despots dread of a newspaper that laughs. -- Mark Twain
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You may say what you want to, but in my opinion she had more sand in her than any girl I ever see; in my opinion she was just full of sand. -- Mark Twain
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I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.. -- Mark Twain
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The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all. -- Mark Twain
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The man who isn't a pessimist is a damned fool. -- Mark Twain
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Summer is the time when it is too hot to do the job that it was too cold to do last winter. -- Mark Twain
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Men are easily dealt with
but when you get the women started, you are in for it, you know. -- Mark Twain
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Today the same thing over. I've got it up the tree again. -- Mark Twain
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The time to begin writing an article is when you have finished it to your satisfaction. By that time you begin to clearly and logically perceive what it is you really want to say. -- Mark Twain
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Those that respect the law and love sausage should watch neither being made. -- Mark Twain
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No, I have no desire for riches. Honest poverty and a conscience, torpid through virtuous inaction, are more to me than corner lots and praise. -- Mark Twain
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Never have a battle of wits with an unarmed person. -- Mark Twain
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A man can be a Christian or a patriot, but he can't legally be a Christian and a patriot - except in the usual way: one of the two with the mouth, the other with the heart. -- Mark Twain
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I was educated once - it took me years to get over it. -- Mark Twain
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The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. -- Mark Twain
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There is no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from our steeples. -- Mark Twain
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Statistics show that we lose more fools on this day than in all the other days of the year put together. This proves, by the number left in stock, that one Fourth of July per year is now inadequate, the country has grown so.
- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar -- Mark Twain
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The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is being attacked, and every man will be glad of these conscience-soothing falsities -- Mark Twain
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What would men be without women? Scarce, sir ... mighty scarce. -- Mark Twain
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Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use. -- Mark Twain
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I have not professionally dealt in truth. Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there. -- Mark Twain
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It was in Warwick Castle that I came across the curious stranger whom I am going to talk about. He attracted me by three things: his candid simplicity, his marvelous familiarity with ancient armor, and the restfulness of his company
for he did all the talking. -- Mark Twain
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In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards. -- Mark Twain
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We have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only when we set out to discover "the secret of God" that our difficulties disappear. -- Mark Twain
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A good and wholesome thing is a little harmless fun in this world; it tones a body up and keeps him human and prevents him from souring. -- Mark Twain
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Man - a figment of God's imagination. -- Mark Twain
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To be good is noble; but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble. -- Mark Twain
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Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do.
Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. -- Mark Twain
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It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. -- Mark Twain
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We Americans are the most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen. -- Mark Twain
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The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled on the instant, scrambled up the high board-fence, and disappeared over it. -- Mark Twain
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I used to think my father was an idiot, until I turned twenty-one ... Then I thought he was a genus. -- Mark Twain
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It is so unsatisfactory to read a noble passage and have no one you love at hand to share the happiness with you. And it is unsatisfactory to read to one's self anyhow - for the uttered voice so heightens the expression. -- Mark Twain
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Never run after you own hat - others will be delighted to do it; why spoil their fun? -- Mark Twain
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Just because you're taught that something's right and everyone believes it's right, it don't make it right. -- Mark Twain
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There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers after the Truth-have you ever heard of a permanent one? -- Mark Twain
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No one can tell me what is a good cigar - for me. I am the only judge. People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst cigars in the world. They bring their own cigars when they come to my house. -- Mark Twain
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To create man was a quaint and original idea, but to add the sheep was tautology. -- Mark Twain
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I don't mind what the opposition say of me so long as they don't tell the truth about me. But when they descend to telling the truth about me I consider that this is taking an unfair advantage. -- Mark Twain
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The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened. -- Mark Twain
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It is your human environment that makes climate -- Mark Twain
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I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases -- Mark Twain
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Oh, I dasn't, Mars Tom. Ole missis she'd take an' tar de head off'n me. 'Deed she would. -- Mark Twain
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The Doors Open at 7, The trouble begins at 8. -- Mark Twain
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On with the dance, let the joy be unconfined. -- Mark Twain
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The rumors of the White Sox demise are greatly exaggerated. -- Mark Twain
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The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing. -- Mark Twain
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Huck was always willing to take a hand in any enterprise that offered entertainment and required no capital, for he had a troublesome super-abundance of that sort of time which is not money. -- Mark Twain
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In all ages of the world this eminently plausible fiction has lured the obtuse infant to financial ruin and disaster. -- Mark Twain
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T[he rules of writing] require that the episodes in a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help to develop it. -- Mark Twain
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Consider well the proportion of things: it is better to be a young June bug than an old bird of paradise. -- Mark Twain
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It was on the 10th day of May - 1884 - that I confessed to age by mounting spectacles for the first time, and in the same hour I renewed my youth, to outward appearance, by mounting a bicycle for the first time. The spectacles stayed on. -- Mark Twain
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When in doubt tell the truth. It will confound your enemies and astound your friends. -- Mark Twain
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No you can't." "I can." "You can't." "Can!" "Can't!" An uncomfortable pause. Then Tom said: "What's your name?" "'Tisn't any of your business, maybe." "Well I 'low I'll MAKE it my business." "Well why don't you?" "If you say much, I will." "Much - much - MUCH. There now. -- Mark Twain
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An inglorious peace is better than a dishonorable war. -- Mark Twain
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If you can't get a compliment any other way, pay yourself one. -- Mark Twain
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In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago. -- Mark Twain
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Expression, expression is the thing - in art. I do not care what it expresses, and I cannot most always sometimes tell, generally, but expression is what I worship, it is what I glory in, with all my impetuous nature. -- Mark Twain
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Eh bien! I no see not that that frog has nothing of better than another. -- Mark Twain
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To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. -- Mark Twain
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No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live. -- Mark Twain
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Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with. -- Mark Twain
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If you want love and abundance in your life, give it away. -- Mark Twain
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There is a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. But of course this was at rare intervals. Ferryboats used to lose valuable trips because their passengers grew old and died, waiting for us to get by. -- Mark Twain
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There was a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in. -- Mark Twain
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The law of work seems unfair, but nothing can change it; the more enjoyment you get out of your work, the more money you will make. -- Mark Twain
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I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time. I have no other restriction as regards smoking. -- Mark Twain
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I was young and foolish then; now I am old and foolisher. -- Mark Twain
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Being made merely in the image of God but not otherwise resembling him enough to be mistaken by anybody but a very near sighted person. -- Mark Twain
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What is the chief end of man?-to get rich. In what way?-dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one and only true? Money is God. Gold and Greenbacks and Stock-father, son, and ghosts of same, three persons in one; These are the true and only God, mighty and supreme. -- Mark Twain
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Necessity knows no law. -- Mark Twain
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The less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands. -- Mark Twain
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Life should begin with age and it's privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and it's capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages. -- Mark Twain
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More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain. -- Mark Twain
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One day man by the slow processes of evolution shall develop into something really fine and high - some billions of years hence, say. -- Mark Twain
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She makes me wash, they make me comb all to thunder; she won't let me sleep in the woodshed ... the widder [widow] eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she wakes up by a bell-everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it -- Mark Twain
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Doesn't make any difference who we are or what we are, there's always somebody to look down on. -- Mark Twain
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God made the Sea of Galilee and its surroundings as they are. Is it the province of Mr. Grimes to improve upon the work? -- Mark Twain
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We have reached a little altitude where we may look down upon the Indian Thugs with a complacent shudder; and we may even hope for a day, many centuries hence, when our posterity will look down upon us in the same way. -- Mark Twain
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A sin takes on a new and real terror when there seems a chance that it is going to be found out. -- Mark Twain
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There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and
shallow: Yet it was the schoolboy who said 'Faith is believing what you
know ain't so'. -- Mark Twain
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An experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often quite often picturesque liar. -- Mark Twain
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[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery; it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug. -- Mark Twain
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When it comes down to pure ornamental cursing, the native American is gifted above the sons of men. -- Mark Twain
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A baby is an inestimable blessing and bother. -- Mark Twain
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Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record. -- Mark Twain
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I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. -- Mark Twain
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Little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. -- Mark Twain
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It is a dear and lovely disposition, and a most valuable one, that can brush away indignities and discourtesies and seek and find the pleasanter features of an experience. -- Mark Twain
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Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on. -- Mark Twain
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Whenever you are popular just pause and see the reflect -- Mark Twain
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A thistle grows about here which has needles on it that would pierce through leather, I think; if one touches you, you can find relief in nothing but profanity. -- Mark Twain
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I could never plan a thing and get it to come out the way I planned it. It came out some other way
some way I had not counted upon. -- Mark Twain
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What is the real function, the essential function, the supreme function, of language? Isn't it merely to convey ideas and emotions? Certainly. Then if we can do it with words of fonetic brevity and compactness, why keep the present cumbersome forms? -- Mark Twain
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Humor, to be comprehensible to anybody, must be built upon a foundation with which he is familiar. If he can't see the foundation the superstructure is to him merely a freak
like the Flatiron building without any visible means of support
something that ought to be arrested. -- Mark Twain
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New Orleans food is as delicious as the less criminal forms of sin. -- Mark Twain
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My interest in my work dies a sudden and violent death when the work is done. -- Mark Twain
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We may not doubt that society in heaven consists mainly of undesirable persons. -- Mark Twain
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A reputable lawyer will advise you to keep out of the law, make the best of a foolish bargain, and not get caught again. -- Mark Twain
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Necessity is the mother of taking chances. -- Mark Twain
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To say a compliment well is a high art and few possess it. -- Mark Twain
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What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. -- Mark Twain
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Custom is, to think a handsome thing in private but tame it down in the utterance. -- Mark Twain
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The timid man yearns for full value and asks for a tenth. The bold man strikes for double value and compromises on par. -- Mark Twain
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In the beginning of a change the patriot is a scarce man, and brave, and hated and scorned. When his cause succeeds, the timid join him, for then it costs nothing to be a patriot. -- Mark Twain
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Tom gave up the brush with reluctance in his face, but alacrity in his heart. -- Mark Twain
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When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction. -- Mark Twain
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What are the proper proportions of a maxim? A minimum of sound to a maximum of sense. -- Mark Twain
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I do not wish any reward but to know I have done the right thing. -- Mark Twain
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Ours is the "land of the free" - nobody denies that - nobody challenges it. [Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.] -- Mark Twain
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Dogs go to heaven -- Mark Twain
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He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though - and loathed him. -- Mark Twain
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Data is like garbage. You'd better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it. -- Mark Twain
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It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt. -- Mark Twain
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Some people get an education without going to college. The rest get it after they get out. -- Mark Twain
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A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by. -- Mark Twain
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A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. -- Mark Twain
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But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of therest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before. -- Mark Twain
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There is not a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American. -- Mark Twain
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The two Testaments are interesting, each in its own way. The Old one gives us a picture of these people's Deity as he was before he got religion, the other one gives us a picture of him as he appeared afterward. -- Mark Twain
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Let us swear while we may, for in heaven it will not be allowed -- Mark Twain
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When congress is in session no American is safe. -- Mark Twain
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The smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes. -- Mark Twain
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Loose and forbear! -- Mark Twain
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There ain't no harm in a hound, nohow. -- Mark Twain
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Look at you in war ... There has never been a just one, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war. -- Mark Twain
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The new political gospel: public office is private graft. -- Mark Twain
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Men and women
even man and wife are foreigners. Each has reserves that the other cannot enter into, nor understand. These have the effect of frontiers. -- Mark Twain
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Familiarity breeds contempt and children. -- Mark Twain
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You say to yourself, 'How can a little girl be a grandmother.' It takes some little time to accept and realize the fact that while you have been growing old, your friends have not been standing still, in that matter. -- Mark Twain
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It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch. -- Mark Twain
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We must put up with clothes as they are they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us to advertise what we wear them to conceal. -- Mark Twain
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If the world ends, I'll just head on down to Kentucky because they're always 20 years behind. -- Mark Twain
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It gratified all the vicious vanity that was in him; -- Mark Twain
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Books are the liberated spirits of men. -- Mark Twain
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You ought never to sass old people- unless they sass you first. -- Mark Twain
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Oh, anybody can run a tick down that don't belong to them. I'm satisfied with it. It's a good enough tick for me." "Sho, there's -- Mark Twain
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We all belong to the nasty stinking little human race, & of course it is not nice for God's beloved vermin to scoff at each other ... Oh, we are a nasty little lot-& to think there are people who would like to save us & continue us. It won't happen if I have any influence. -- Mark Twain
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A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt -- Mark Twain
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Forget and forgive. This is not difficult when properly understood. It means forget inconvenient duties, then forgive yourself for forgetting. By rigid practice and stern determination, it comes easy. -- Mark Twain
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You may have noticed that the less I know about a subject the more confidence I have, and the more new light I throw on it. -- Mark Twain
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The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine, bracing and delicious. And why shouldn't it be?
it is the same the angels breathe. -- Mark Twain
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An honest man in politics shines more there than he would elsewhere.
- A Tramp Abroad -- Mark Twain
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So there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't going to no more. -- Mark Twain
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There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it, because if I'd know'd what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a tackled it. -- Mark Twain
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It ain't no use to try to learn you nothing, Huck. -- Mark Twain
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Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so. -- Mark Twain
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To us, our house was not unsentient matter
it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. -- Mark Twain
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If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves. -- Mark Twain
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That's the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don't care, individuals do. -- Mark Twain
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By his father he is English, by his mother he is Americanto my mind the blend which makes the perfect man. -- Mark Twain
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December is the toughest month of the year. Others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, October, August, and February. -- Mark Twain
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On a book by Henry James: Once you put it down, you simply can't pick it up. -- Mark Twain
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Out of the public schools comes the greatness of the nation. -- Mark Twain
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I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time. -- Mark Twain
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The first half of my life I went to school, the second half of my life I got an education. -- Mark Twain
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Enthusiasm is caught, not taught. -- Mark Twain
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Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable. -- Mark Twain
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Immaculate Conception, that if the Virgin would permit him to -- Mark Twain
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The introduction of homeopathy forced the old school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business. You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths to destroy it. -- Mark Twain
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If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later. -- Mark Twain
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Explaining humor is a lot like dissecting a frog, you learn a lot in the process, but in the end you kill it. -- Mark Twain
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I do not wish to hear about the moon from someone who has not been there. -- Mark Twain
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Talk? Well, it's just Muff Potter, Muff Potter, Muff Potter all the time. It keeps me in a sweat, constant, so's I want to hide som'ers." "That's just the same way they go on round me. I reckon he's a goner. Don't you feel sorry for him, sometimes?" "Most always - most always. He ain't -- Mark Twain
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A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read. -- Mark Twain
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I never did a thing in all my life, virtuous or otherwise that I didn't repent of within twenty-four hours. -- Mark Twain
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A better idea than my own is to listen. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing training cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. It can turn bad morals to good; it can destroy bad principles and recreate good ones; it can lift men to angelship. -- Mark Twain
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We do not get ice-cream every where, and so, when we do, we are apt to dissipate to excess. We never cared any thing about ice-cream at home, but we look upon it with a sort of idolatry now that it is so scarce in these red-hot climates of the East. -- Mark Twain
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Well, the priest did very well, considering. He got in all the details, and that is a good thing in a local item: you see, he had kept books for the undertaker-department of his church when he was younger, and there, you know, the money's in the details; the more details, the more swag: -- Mark Twain
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A man must not hold himself aloof from the things which his friends and community have at heart if he would be liked. -- Mark Twain
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Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others. -- Mark Twain
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We regret the things we don't do more than the things we do. -- Mark Twain
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Mr. Young observed that life was a sad, sad thing - "because the joy of every new marriage a man contracted was so apt to be blighted by the inopportune funeral of a less recent bride. -- Mark Twain
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A dollar picked up in the road is more satisfaction to you than the ninety-and -nine which you had to work for, and money won at faro or in stock snuggles into your heart in the same way. -- Mark Twain
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Who are the oppressors? The few: the King, the capitalist, and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat. -- Mark Twain
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I was an arden Hayes man, but that was natural, for I was pretty young at the time, I have since convinced myself that the political opinioins of a nation are of next to no value, in any case, but that what little rag of value they posess is to be found among the old, rather than among the young. -- Mark Twain
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My financial views are of the most decided character, but they are not likely, perhaps, to increase my popularity with the advocates of inflation. I do not insist upon the special supremacy of rag money or hard money. The great fundamental principle of my life is to take any kind I can get. -- Mark Twain
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There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it. -- Mark Twain
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If I were to construct a God I would furnish Him with some way and qualities and characteristics which the Present lacks. -- Mark Twain
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Agassiz does recommend authors to eat fish, because the phosphorus in it makes brains. But I cannot help you to a decision about the amount you need to eat. Perhaps a couple of whales would be enough. -- Mark Twain
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India has two million gods, and worships them all. In religion all other countries are paupers; India is the only millionaire. -- Mark Twain
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India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only. -- Mark Twain
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In religion, India is the only millionaire ... the One land that all men desire to see, and having seen once, by even a glimpse, would not give that glimpse for all the shows of all the rest of the globe combined. -- Mark Twain
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Perhaps it will be simplest to throw away the tags and generalize India with one all-comprehensive name, as the Land of Wonders. -- Mark Twain
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Our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India. -- Mark Twain
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I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army. -- Mark Twain
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There is no distinctly native American criminal class save Congress. -- Mark Twain
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There is no such thing as the Queen's English. The property has gone into the hands of a joint stock company and we own the bulk of the shares! -- Mark Twain
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I don't want no better book than what your face is. -- Mark Twain
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One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself -- Mark Twain
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Say - what is dead cats good for, Huck?" "Good for? Cure warts with. -- Mark Twain
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The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients didn't have was very voluminous. -- Mark Twain
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To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, "Our Country, right or wrong," and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation? -- Mark Twain
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The two Great Unknowns, the two Illustrious Conjecturabilities! They are the best known unknown persons that have ever drawn breath upon the planet. -- Mark Twain
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We may not pay Satan reverence, for that would be indiscreet, but we can at least respect his talents. -- Mark Twain
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I waked that I judged it was after eight o'clock. I laid there in the grass and the cool shade thinking about things, and feeling rested and ruther comfortable and satisfied. I could see the sun out at one or two holes, but mostly it was big trees all about, and gloomy in -- Mark Twain
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Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog. -- Mark Twain
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When one has tasted watermelon he knows what the angels eat. -- Mark Twain
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We adore titles and heredities in our hearts and ridicule them with our mouths. This is our democratic privilege. -- Mark Twain
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Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense. -- Mark Twain
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It is by the fortune of God that, in this country, we have three benefits: freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and the wisdom never to use either. -- Mark Twain
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Yes. And I'm rich now when I think about it. I own myself, and I'm worth eight hundred dollars. I wish I had the money. Then I wouldn't ever want anything else -- Mark Twain
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There are laws to protect the freedom of the press's speech, but none that are worth anything to protect the people from the press -- Mark Twain
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All gentle cant and philosophizing to the contrary notwithstanding, no people in this world ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion: it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood. -- Mark Twain
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It is by the goodness of god that in our country we have those 3 unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them. -- Mark Twain
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In our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either. -- Mark Twain
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Hotels are the only proper places for lecturers. When I am ill-natured I so enjoy the freedom of a hotel where I can ring up a domestic and give him a quarter and then break furniture over him. -- Mark Twain
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Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it. -- Mark Twain
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The observance of Thanksgiving Day-as a function-has become general of late years. The Thankfulness is not so general. This is natural. Two-thirds of the nation have always had hard luck and a hard time during the year, and this has a calming effect upon their enthusiasm. -- Mark Twain
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The Church still prizes the Moral Sense as man's noblest asset today, although the Church knows God had a distinctly poor opinion of it and did what he could in his clumsy way to keep his happy Children of the Garden from acquiring it. -- Mark Twain
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Humor must be one of the chief attributes of God. Plants and animals that are distinctly humorous in form and characteristics are God's jokes. -- Mark Twain
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Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. -- Mark Twain
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Stay away from people who belittle your ambition, small people do that, but great people make you like to be great! -- Mark Twain
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It ain't the parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it's the parts that I do understand. -- Mark Twain
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Each man must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, which course is patriotic and which isn't. You cannot shirk this and be a man. To decide against your conviction is to be an unqualified and excusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. -- Mark Twain
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When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years. -- Mark Twain
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Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures; figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don't take hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick. -- Mark Twain
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If I had been helping the Almighty when he created man, I would have had him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How much better to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning! -- Mark Twain
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The very "marks" on the bottom of a piece of rare crockery are able to throw me into a gibbering ecstasy. -- Mark Twain
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She warn't particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size. -- Mark Twain
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Satan hasn't a single salaried helper; the Opposition employs a million. -- Mark Twain
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The cost of living hasn't effected its popularity. -- Mark Twain
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FOR EVERY GRAIN OF SAND IN OUR WORLD, THERE ARE ONE MILLION STARS IN THE UNIVERSE. -- Mark Twain
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Mark Twain.
The truth should never be permitted to stand in the way of a good story. -- Mark Twain
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There are no accidents, all things have a deep and calculated purpose; sometimes the methods employed by Providence seem strange and incongruous, but we have only to be patient and wait for the result: then we recognize that no others would have answered the purpose, and we are rebuked and humbled. -- Mark Twain
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The easy part of being an artist is figuring out the message that everyone else is ready to hear. The hard part is waiting for the proper lull to make the announcement. -- Mark Twain
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There's a good spot tucked away somewhere in everybody. You'll be a long time finding it, sometimes. -- Mark Twain
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Travel is lethal to prejudice. -- Mark Twain
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His hair was short and parted accurately in the middle, and he had all the look of an American person who would be likely to begin his signature with an initial, and spell his middle name out. -- Mark Twain
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When in doubt, tell the truth. That maxim I did invent, but never expected it to be applied to me. I did say, "When you are in doubt," but when I am in doubt myself I use more sagacity. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing seems to please a fly so much as to be taken for a currant; and if it can be baked in a cake and palmed off on the unwary, it dies happy. -- Mark Twain
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Preachers are always pleasant company when they are off duty. -- Mark Twain
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The preacher who casts a vote for conscience' sake, runs the risk of starving. -- Mark Twain
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I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well. -- Mark Twain
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Two days overdue, THE WORLD'S WORK has not reached me. Pray make a note of this. I would rather not have to resort to violence. -- Mark Twain
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It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss. -- Mark Twain
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So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it but I couldnt find honest employment. -- Mark Twain
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God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage -- Mark Twain
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The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it. -- Mark Twain
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Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. -- Mark Twain
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Cats are the wildest of the tame and the tamest of the wild -- Mark Twain
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A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt ... -- Mark Twain
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Let us make a special effort to stop communicating with each other, so we can have some conversation. -- Mark Twain
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Do good when you can, and charge when you think they will stand it. -- Mark Twain
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In the small town of Hannibal, Missouri, when I was a boy, everybody was poor, but didn't know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it. -- Mark Twain
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It is said, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent upon him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not. -- Mark Twain
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No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done. -- Mark Twain
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I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead
and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead, and then they would be honest so much earlier. -- Mark Twain
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When in doubt, tell the truth. -- Mark Twain
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For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again - which I hope he will not do; he made trouble enough before. -- Mark Twain
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Moralists and philosophers have adjudged those who throw temptation in the way of the erring, equally guilty with those who are thereby led into evil -- Mark Twain
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When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it. -- Mark Twain
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All Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling for idiots, and a compassion for them, on account of personal experience and heredity. -- Mark Twain
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Always - from all companies, high or low - she went forth richer in honor and esteem than when she came. -- Mark Twain
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Let us be thankful for the fools. But for them the rest of us could not succeed. -- Mark Twain
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DECEMBER 26TH. The dog came to see me at eight o'clock this morning. He was very affectionate, poor orphan! My room will be his quarters hereafter. -- Mark Twain
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Humor is mankind's greatest blessing. -- Mark Twain
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Our consciences take NO notice of pain inflicted upon others until it reaches a point where it gives pain to US. In ALL cases without exception we are absolutely indifferent to another person's pain until his sufferings make us uncomfortable. -- Mark Twain
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He was such a good man that people hated to see him coming. -- Mark Twain
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A person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was gitting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. -- Mark Twain
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Always tell the truth; then you don't have to remember anything -- Mark Twain
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Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke. -- Mark Twain
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Give an Irishman lager for a month and he's a dead man. An Irishman's stomach is lined with copper, and the beer corrodes it. But whiskey polishes the copper and is the saving of him. -- Mark Twain
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One is apt to overestimate beauty when it is rare. -- Mark Twain
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When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me. -- Mark Twain
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I'm pushing 60 years of age ... and that's enough exercise for me. -- Mark Twain
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Tom did play hookey, and -- Mark Twain
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Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today. -- Mark Twain
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Greece is a bleak, unsmiling desert, without agriculture, manufactures or commerce, apparently. What supports its poverty-stricken people or its Government, is a mystery. -- Mark Twain
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God Almighty made us all, and some He gives eyes that's blind, and some He gives eyes that can see, and I reckon it ain't none of our lookout what He done it for; it's all right, or He'd 'a' fixed it some other way. -- Mark Twain
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Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness ... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast. -- Mark Twain
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The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nations, and from the mass of the nation only-not from its privileged classes. -- Mark Twain
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I have been cautioned to talk but be careful not to say anything. I do not consider this a difficult task. -- Mark Twain
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Make your vocation your vacation. That is the secret to success. -- Mark Twain
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Confound it, it's foolish, Tom -- Mark Twain
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Well, everybody does it that way, Huck."
"Tom, I am not everybody. -- Mark Twain
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He had a dream and it shot him. -- Mark Twain
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An open mind leaves a chance for someone to drop a worthwhile thought in it. -- Mark Twain
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At first when the Paladin heard us tell about the glories of the Royal Audience he was broken-hearted because he was not taken with us to it; next, his talk was full of what he would have done if he had been there; and within two days he was telling what he did do when he was there. -- Mark Twain
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Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free. -- Mark Twain
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Fry me an optimist for breakfast. -- Mark Twain
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They mourned for his kind of Christianity, and he frankly scoffed at theirs; but both parties went on loving each other just the same. -- Mark Twain
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Our opinions do not really blossom into fruition until we have expressed them to someone else. -- Mark Twain
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Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn't be identified because it had lost its tag. -- Mark Twain
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Why should anybody want to save the human race, or damn it either? Does God want its society? Does Satan? -- Mark Twain
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Sometimes my feelings are so hot that I have to take the pen and put them out on paper to keep them from setting me afire inside; then all that ink and labor are wasted because I can't print the results -- Mark Twain
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Wagner's music is better than it sounds. -- Mark Twain
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To stand still is to fall behind. -- Mark Twain
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Gold in its native state is but dull, unornamental stuff, and only lowborn metals excite the admiration of the ignorant with an ostentatious glitter. However, like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica. -- Mark Twain
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Yes, a genuine expert can always foretell a thing that is five hundred years away easier than he can a thing that's only five hundred seconds off. -- Mark Twain
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Explore. Dream. Discover. -- Mark Twain
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If the man doesn't believe as we do, we say he is a crank, and that settles it. I mean, it does nowadays, because now we can't burn him. -- Mark Twain
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To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence. -- Mark Twain
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It surprises me sometimes to think how much we do know and how intelligent we are. -- Mark Twain
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In discarding the monkey and substituting man, our Father in Heaven did the monkey an undeserved injustice. -- Mark Twain
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Prosperity is the surest breeder of insolence I know. -- Mark Twain
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Work is a necessary evil to be avoided. -- Mark Twain
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Our Congresses consist of Christians. In their private life they are true to every obligation of honor; yet in every session they violate them all, and do it without shame. Because honor to party is above honor to themselves. -- Mark Twain
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Can any plausible excuse be furnished for the crime of creating the human race? -- Mark Twain
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Is a person's public and private opinion the same? It is thought there have been instances. -- Mark Twain
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A solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity. -- Mark Twain
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Only when a republic's life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is wrong. There is no other time. -- Mark Twain
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Once I talked to the inmates of an insane asylum in Hartford. I have talked to idiots a thousand times, but only once to the insane ... -- Mark Twain
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Like many other simple-hearted souls, it was her pet vanity to believe she was endowed with a talent for dark and mysterious diplomacy, and she loved to contemplate her most transparent devices as marvels of low cunning. Said -- Mark Twain
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Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights ... sexual intercourse! ... His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. -- Mark Twain
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Man is without doubt the most interesting fool there is. He concedes that God made the angels immune from pain and death, and that he could have been similarly kind to man, but denies that he was under any moral obligation to do so. -- Mark Twain
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Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
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I cherish the dreams of yesterday and dare not dwell on the err's of my past whose fate has been long decided, and effect I can not change. For the dreams of yesterday are the challenges of today, and the hope for tomorrow. -- Mark Twain
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I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility. -- Mark Twain
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All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. -- Mark Twain
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Every man is wholly honest to himself and to God, but not to any one else. -- Mark Twain
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All saints can do miracles, but few of them can keep a hotel. -- Mark Twain
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Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about. -- Mark Twain
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A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it. -- Mark Twain
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If we had less statemanship we could get along with fewer battleships. -- Mark Twain
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It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script. -- Mark Twain
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Write what you know. -- Mark Twain
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I like a thin book because it will steady a table, a leather volume because it will strop a razor and a heavy book because it can be thrown at a cat. -- Mark Twain
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The physician who knows only medicine, knows not even medicine. -- Mark Twain
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No church property is taxed and so the infidel and the atheist and the man without religion are taxed to make up the deficit. -- Mark Twain
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The reign of Edward VI was a singularly merciful one for those harsh times. Now that we are taking leave of him let us try to keep this in our minds, to his credit -- Mark Twain
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I have spent most of my life worrying about things that have never happened. -- Mark Twain
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The New York papers have long known that no large question is ever really settled until I have been consulted. -- Mark Twain
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No real gentleman will tell the naked truth in the presence of ladies. -- Mark Twain
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It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us - dreamers and indolent ... It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich - these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it. -- Mark Twain
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I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one. -- Mark Twain
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Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side -- Mark Twain
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I'm in favor of progress; it's change I don't like. -- Mark Twain
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Everybody's private motto: It's better to be popular than right. -- Mark Twain
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A banker is somebody who lends you an umbrella & takes it away as soon as it starts raining. -- Mark Twain
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We made many trips to the lake after that, and had many a hairbreadth escape and bloodcurdling adventure which will never be recorded in any history. -- Mark Twain
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I am not interested to know whether vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn't ... The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity toward it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further. -- Mark Twain
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I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off; it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds. -- Mark Twain
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He had only one vanity; he thought he could give advice better than any other person. -- Mark Twain
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Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare. -- Mark Twain
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The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery. -- Mark Twain
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Love is madness, if thwarted it develops fast. -- Mark Twain
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A lie can make it half way around the world before the truth has time to put its boots on. -- Mark Twain
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There are three kinds of liars: liars, damned liars, and statisticians -- Mark Twain
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There are two types of speakers: those that
are nervous and those that are liars. -- Mark Twain
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There are two kinds of speakers. Those who are nervous and those who are liars. -- Mark Twain
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It is not in the least likely that any life has ever been lived which was not a failure in the secret judgment of the person who lived it. -- Mark Twain
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No man is a failure who has friends. -- Mark Twain
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You can't make a life over. Society wouldn't let you if you would. -- Mark Twain
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Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it. -- Mark Twain
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Do not offer a compliment and ask a favor at the same time. A compliment that is charged for is not valuable. -- Mark Twain
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I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man's reasoning powers are not above the monkey's. -- Mark Twain
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The stranger's first feeling, when suddenly confronted by that towering and awful apparition wrapped in its shroud of snow, is breath-taking astonishment. It is as if heaven's gates had swung open and exposed the throne. (Twain on seeing the Jungfrau.) -- Mark Twain
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A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory. -- Mark Twain
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It's easy to endure adversity
if it happens to someone else. -- Mark Twain
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The worst loneliness is to not be comfortable with yourself. -- Mark Twain
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The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself. -- Mark Twain
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It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it. -- Mark Twain
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Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep 'til noon. -- Mark Twain
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How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps! -- Mark Twain
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The two most important days if your life are the day you are born ... and the day you find out why having multiple screens for your computer is so awesome because now reports and grants are like a billion times easier! -- Mark Twain
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My own luck has been curious all my literary life; I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe. -- Mark Twain
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It is a good and gentle religion, but inconvenient. -- Mark Twain
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If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present. -- Mark Twain
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We did not oversleep at St. Nicholas. The church-bell began to ring at four-thirty in the morning, and from the length of time it continued to ring I judged that it takes the Swiss sinner a good while to get the invitation through his head. -- Mark Twain
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We can't reach old age by another man's road. -- Mark Twain
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My faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. -- Mark Twain
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Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century. -- Mark Twain
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Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. -- Mark Twain
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The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously. -- Mark Twain
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The truth hurts, but silence kills. -- Mark Twain
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Let your secret sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight
this is magnanimity; but bet on the other one
this is business. -- Mark Twain
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It doesn't matter the size of the dog in the fight, rather the size of the fight in the dog. -- Mark Twain
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High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water. -- Mark Twain
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Knowledge becomes wisdom only after it has been put to good use. -- Mark Twain
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My complaint simply concerns the decay of the _art_ of lying. -- Mark Twain
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It's awful undermining to the intellect, German is; you want to take it in small doses, or first you know your brains all run together, and you feel them flapping around in your head same as so much drawn butter. -- Mark Twain
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Sufficient unto the day is one baby. As long as you are in your right mind don't you ever pray for twins. Twins amount to a permanent riot; and there ain't any real difference between triplets and a insurrection.
- The Babies speech 1879 -- Mark Twain
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No one has ever seen a Republican mass meeting that was devoid of the perception of the ludicrous. -- Mark Twain
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All of us contain Music & Truth, but most of us can't get it out. -- Mark Twain
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Few things are more irritating than when someone who is wrong is also very effective in making his point. -- Mark Twain
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For a little while, hope made a show of reviving - not with any reason to back it, but only because it is its nature to revive when the spring has not been taken out of it by age and familiarity with failure. -- Mark Twain
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Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand. -- Mark Twain
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How many of you believe in telekinesis? Raise my hand. -- Mark Twain
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Your actions speak so much louder than words. -- Mark Twain
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It is not best to use our morals weekdays, it gets them out of repair for Sunday. -- Mark Twain
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Recipe for a long life: Only smoke while awake. Only run when being chased. -- Mark Twain
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And when the middle of the afternoon came, from being a poor poverty-stricken boy in the morning, Tom was literally rolling in wealth. -- Mark Twain
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Man never creates, he only recombines the lines and colors of his own existance. -- Mark Twain
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The conviction of the rich that the poor are happier is no more foolish than the conviction of the poor that the rich are. -- Mark Twain
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What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension. -- Mark Twain
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A man may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands. -- Mark Twain
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PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD AND RIDERS TO THE SEA, J. M. Synge. 80pp. 0-486-27562-0 THE -- Mark Twain
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Steal a chicken if you get a chance, Huck, because if you don't want it, someone else does and a good deed ain't never forgotten. -- Mark Twain
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Men are like bank accounts. The more money, the more interest they generate. -- Mark Twain
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We are discreet sheep; we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove. -- Mark Twain
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A journalist is a reporter out of a job. -- Mark Twain
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What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey. -- Mark Twain
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You can't put too much spin on a miracle. -- Mark Twain
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A sound heart is a surer guide than an ill-trained conscience. -- Mark Twain
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You are about as happy as you make up your mind to be. -- Mark Twain
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If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day. -- Mark Twain
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Truth is stranger than fiction... -- Mark Twain
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Let us be grateful to Adam: he cut us out of the blessing of idleness and won for us the curse of labor. -- Mark Twain
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Hello Huckleberry!"
"Hello, yourself, and see how you like it."
"What's that you got?"
"Dead cat."
"Lemme see him, Huck. My, he's pretty stiff. Where'd you get him?"
"Bought him off'n a boy. -- Mark Twain
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There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. -- Mark Twain
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His money is twice tainted: taint yours and taint mine. -- Mark Twain
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It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time. -- Mark Twain
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We used to trust in God. I think it was in 1863 that some genius suggested that it be put upon the gold and silver coins which circulated among the rich. They didn't put it on the nickels and coppers because they didn't think the poor folks had any trust in God. -- Mark Twain
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My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses and hypocrisies. -- Mark Twain
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The [Kodak is] the only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn't bribe. -- Mark Twain
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English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place. -- Mark Twain
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Distance lends enchantment to the view. -- Mark Twain
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Never do wrong when people are looking. -- Mark Twain
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Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company. -- Mark Twain
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What a man misses mostly in heaven is company. -- Mark Twain
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In love, you pay as you leave. -- Mark Twain
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I am able to say that while I am not ruggedly well, I am not ill enough to excite an undertaker. -- Mark Twain
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Do right and you will be conspicuous. -- Mark Twain
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But when weariness finally forced him to be silent, he was no longer of use to his tormentors, and they sought amusement elsewhere -- Mark Twain
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We were good boys, good Presbyterian boys, and loyal and all that; anyway, we were good Presbyterian boys when the weather was doubtful; when it was fair, we did wander a little from the fold. -- Mark Twain
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The Book of Mormon is chloroform in print -- Mark Twain
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The southerner talks music. -- Mark Twain
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The educated Southerner has no use for an 'r', except at the beginning of a word. -- Mark Twain
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Senator: Person who makes laws in Washington when not doing time. -- Mark Twain
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Framed in black moldings on the wall, other works of arts, conceived and committed on the premises, by the young ladies; being grim black-and-white crayons; landscapes, mostly: lake, solitary sail-boat, petrified clouds, pre-geological trees on shore, anthracite precipice; -- Mark Twain
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As a thinker and planner the ant is the equal of any savage race of men; as a self-educated specialist in several arts she is the superior of any savage race of men; and in one or two high mental qualities she is above the reach of any man, savage or civilized! -- Mark Twain
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Sum all the gifts that man is endowed with, and we give our greatest share of admiration to his energy. And today, if I were a heathen, I would rear a statue to Energy and fall down and worship it! -- Mark Twain
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Look at the mother of Washington! She raised a boy that could not tell a lie
could not tell a lie! But he never had any chance. It might have been different if he had belonged to the Washington Newspaper Correspondents' Club -- Mark Twain
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History is strewn thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill, but a lie, well told, is immortal. -- Mark Twain
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He could charm an audience an hour on a stretch without ever getting rid of an idea. -- Mark Twain
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Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint. -- Mark Twain
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A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them. -- Mark Twain
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In Austria an editor who can write well is valuable, but he is not likely to remain so unless he can handle a sabre with charm. -- Mark Twain
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An adventure is something that while it's happening you wish it wasn't. -- Mark Twain
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When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. -- Mark Twain
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Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink - under any circumstances. -- Mark Twain
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Come! surely you've got a heart hidden away somewhere; open it up; give it air; show at least some little corner of it. -- Mark Twain
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What got you into trouble?" says the baldhead to t'other chap.
"Well, I'd been selling an article to take the tartar off the teeth - and it does take it off, too, and generly the enamel along with it - -- Mark Twain
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The Jabalites ... They worship no god; and if we in goodness of heart do send a missionary to show them the way of life, they listen with respect to all he hath to say, and then they eat him. This doth tend to hinder the spread of light. -- Mark Twain
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The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. -- Mark Twain
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I knew a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned forty percent more about cats than the man who didn't. -- Mark Twain
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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain
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We all know about Father Damien, the French priest who voluntarily forsook the world and went to the leper island of Molokai to labor among its population of sorrowful exiles who wait there, in slow-consuming misery, for death to come and release them from their troubles; -- Mark Twain
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If it is a miracle any sort of evidence will answer. But if it is a fact, proof is necessary. -- Mark Twain
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In the Spring, I have counted 136 different kinds of weather inside of 24 hours. -- Mark Twain
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On one of these occasions, suddenly there hovered around the top of the rock a brightness of unequaled clearness and color, which, in increasingly smaller circles thickened, was the enchanting figure of the beautiful Lore. -- Mark Twain
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By and by when each nation has 20,000 battleships and 5,000,000 soldiers we shall all be safe and the wisdom of statesmanship will stand confirmed. -- Mark Twain
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Always do what's right. That will gratify some and surprise the rest. -- Mark Twain
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If God had meant for us to be naked, we'd have been born that way. -- Mark Twain
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The billiard table is better than the doctor. -- Mark Twain
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The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter ... -- Mark Twain
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The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration ... they think it ill manners. -- Mark Twain
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If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places. -- Mark Twain
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Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale. -- Mark Twain
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Worrying is paying interest on a debt you might not even owe. -- Mark Twain
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Travel is fatal to narrowmindedness, prejudice and bigotry. -- Mark Twain
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New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions. -- Mark Twain
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We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie; we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity. -- Mark Twain
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Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge. -- Mark Twain
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You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of you imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there. -- Mark Twain
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Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll - -- Mark Twain
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Humor is the great thing, the saving thing. The minute it crops up, all our irritations and resentments slip away and a sunny spirit takes their place. -- Mark Twain
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Not a single right is indestructible: a new might can at any time abolish it, hence, man possesses not a single permanent right. God is Might (and He is shifty, malicious, and uncertain). -- Mark Twain
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Yes, King Edward VI lived only a few years, poor boy, but he lived them worthily. -- Mark Twain
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Dear me, what would this barren vocabulary get out of the mightiest spectacle? - the burning of Rome in Nero's time, for instance? Why, it would merely say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window, fireman brake his neck!' Why, THAT ain't a picture! -- Mark Twain
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ain't a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for -- Mark Twain
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it made one drunk with delight to look upon it. -- Mark Twain
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Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity. -- Mark Twain
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Eight grown Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone-if still alive. -- Mark Twain
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The altar cloth of one aeon is the doormat of the next. -- Mark Twain
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Tolstoy carelessly neglects to include a boat race. -- Mark Twain
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I don't see any use in having a uniform and arbitrary way of spelling words. We might as well make all clothes alike and cook all dishes alike. Sameness is tiresome; variety is pleasing. -- Mark Twain
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'Don't you worry, and don't you hurry.' I know that phrase by heart, and if all other music should perish out of the world it would still sing to me. -- Mark Twain
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The miracle or the power that elevates the few is to be found in their industry, application and perseverance under the promptings of a brave, determined spirit. -- Mark Twain
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In this life, Satan, but in another? We shall meet in another, surely?"
Then, all tranquilly and soberly, he made the strange answer, "There is no other. -- Mark Twain
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A man who chooses not to read is just as ignorant as a man who cannot read. -- Mark Twain
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We recognize that there are no trivial occurrences in life if we get the right focus on them. -- Mark Twain
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I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty. -- Mark Twain
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Lovely as he was, Satan could be cruelly offensive when he chose; and he always chose when the human race was brought to his attention. He always turned up his nose at it, and never had a kind word for it. -- Mark Twain
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When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop - that is, with a marriage; but when he writes about juveniles, he must stop where he best can. -- Mark Twain
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What, then, is the true Gospel of consistency? Change. Who is the really consistent man? The man who changes. Since change is the law of his being, he cannot be consistent if he stick in a rut. -- Mark Twain
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Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned. -- Mark Twain
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When a humorist ventures upon the grave concerns of life he must do his job better than another man or he works harm to his cause. -- Mark Twain
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I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way. -- Mark Twain
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A healthy and wholesome cheerfulness is not necessarily impossible to any occupation. -- Mark Twain
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I have been complimented many times and they always embarrass me; I always feel they have not said enough. -- Mark Twain
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Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.' -- Mark Twain
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It is ingeniously named, for it looks just as a cross would look if it looked like something else. -- Mark Twain
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We despise no source that can pay us a pleasing attention. -- Mark Twain
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The public is the only critic whose opinion is worth anything at all. -- Mark Twain
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The law of work does seem utterly unfair-but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, too. -- Mark Twain
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I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience. -- Mark Twain
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I fell in love with the most cordial and sociable city in the Union. -- Mark Twain
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Custom is petrification, nothing but dynamite can dislodge it for a century. -- Mark Twain
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The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes. -- Mark Twain
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We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles. -- Mark Twain
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The rain ... falls upon the just and the unjust alike; a thing which would not happen if I were superintending the rain's affairs. No, I would rain softly and sweetly on the just, but if I caught a sample of the unjust outdoors, I would drown him. -- Mark Twain
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It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet. -- Mark Twain
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One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives. -- Mark Twain
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It's not the parts of the Bible I don't know that worries me ... it's the parts that I do. -- Mark Twain
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Persons who think there is no such thing as luck good or bad are entitled to their opinion, although I think they ought to be shot for it. -- Mark Twain
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His head was an hour-glass; it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once. -- Mark Twain
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One holds a bottle of red wine by the neck, a woman by the waist, and a bottle of champagne by the derriere. -- Mark Twain
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Australian History:
... does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies. -- Mark Twain
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The community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. -- Mark Twain
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Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. -- Mark Twain
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If they [the dead] should speak, it would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realise, deep down, that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they seem to be-and never can be. -- Mark Twain
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The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up. -- Mark Twain
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A man may have no bad habits and have worse -- Mark Twain
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The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that's what an army is
a mob; they don't fight with courage that's born in them, but with courage that's borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any MAN at the head of it is BENEATH pitifulness. -- Mark Twain
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A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the banjo and doesn't. -- Mark Twain
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All people have had ill luck, but Jairus's daughter and Lazarus had the worst. -- Mark Twain
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I have done more for San Francisco than any of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more - I could have gone earlier - it was suggested. -- Mark Twain
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he could be suspected of knowing anything about the murder, but still he could not be comfortable in the midst of this gossip. It kept him in a cold -- Mark Twain
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Notwithstanding all this furniture, there was still room to turn around in, but not to swing a cat in, at least with entire security to the cat. However, the room was large, for a ship's stateroom, and was in every way satisfactory. -- Mark Twain
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When some men discharge an obligation, you can hear the report for miles around. -- Mark Twain
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His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere. -- Mark Twain
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I can't do no literary work for the rest of this year because I'm meditating another lawsuit and looking around for a defendant. -- Mark Twain
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You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom. -- Mark Twain
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Never tell a lie-except for practice. -- Mark Twain
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I believe I have no prejudices whatsoever. All I need to know is that a man is a member of the human race. That's bad enough for me. -- Mark Twain
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The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories - and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures. -- Mark Twain
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I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting. -- Mark Twain
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It is poison - rank poison - to knuckle down to care and hardships. They must come to us all, albeit in different shapes, and we may not escape them. It is not possible. But we may swindle them out of half of their puissance with a stiff upper lip. -- Mark Twain
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It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled. -- Mark Twain
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Religion consists in a set of things which the average man thinks he believes and wishes he was certain of. -- Mark Twain
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Eloquence is the essential thing in a speech, not information. -- Mark Twain
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In due time the shores of Italy were sighted, and as we stood gazing from the decks, early in the bright summer morning, the stately city of Genoa rose up out of the sea and flung back the sunlight from her hundred palaces. -- Mark Twain
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Honor is a harder master than the law. -- Mark Twain
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I know grammar by ear only, not by note, not by the rules. -- Mark Twain
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I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way. -- Mark Twain
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If you tell the truth you do not need a good memory! -- Mark Twain
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I have too much respect for the truth to drag it out on every trifling occasion. -- Mark Twain
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An awkward, unscientific lie is often as ineffectual as the truth. -- Mark Twain
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Those who say truth is stranger than fiction have wasted their time on poorly written fiction. -- Mark Twain
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If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won't sit on a hot stove again. That cat won't sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don't like stoves. -- Mark Twain
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The man who speaks an injurious truth lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving. The -- Mark Twain
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Familiarity breeds contempt. How accurate that is. The reason we hold truth in such respect is because we have so little opportunity to get familiar with it. -- Mark Twain
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Truth is such a precious article - let us all economize in its use. -- Mark Twain
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An injurious truth has no merit over an injurious lie. Neither should ever be uttered. The man who speaks an injurious truth, lest his soul be not saved if he do otherwise, should reflect that that sort of a soul is not strictly worth saving. -- Mark Twain
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I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it. -- Mark Twain
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Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it. -- Mark Twain
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When ill luck begins, it does not come in sprinkles, but in showers. -- Mark Twain
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There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. -- Mark Twain
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In truth I care little about any party's politics-the man behind it is the important thing. -- Mark Twain
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A little lie can travel half way 'round the world while Truth is still lacing up her boots. -- Mark Twain
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Humor is the good natured side of a truth. -- Mark Twain
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I know all about audiences, they believe everything you say, except when you are telling the truth. -- Mark Twain
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A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar. -- Mark Twain
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Truth is neither alive nor dead; it just aggravates itself all the time ... -- Mark Twain
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All democrats are insane, but not one of them knows it -- Mark Twain
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If I can capture truth in its simplest form, beauty will follow like a sledgehammer. -- Mark Twain
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Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. -- Mark Twain
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Never tell the truth to people who are not worthy of it. -- Mark Twain
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In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience. -- Mark Twain
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None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth. -- Mark Twain
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The reason why truth is so much stranger than fiction is that there is no requirement for it to be consistent. -- Mark Twain
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Why shouldn't truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense. -- Mark Twain
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Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth. -- Mark Twain
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Now, then, that is the tale. Some of it is true. -- Mark Twain
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Homely truth is unpalatable. -- Mark Twain
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Truth is stranger than fiction-to some people, but I am measurably familiar with it. -- Mark Twain
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. -- Mark Twain
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We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision true
humor. -- Mark Twain
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Make your vacation your vocation. -- Mark Twain
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today i will find strength in my weakness -- Mark Twain
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You meet people who forget you. You forget people you meet. But sometimes you meet those people you can't forget. Those are your 'friends -- Mark Twain
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An Englishman is a person who does things because they have been done before. An American is a person who does things because they haven't been done before. -- Mark Twain
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If your mother tells you to do a thing, it is wrong to reply that you won't. It is better and more becoming to intimate that you will do as she bids you, and then afterward act quietly in the matter according to the dictates of your best judgment. -- Mark Twain
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Remember this, take this to heart, live by it, die for it if necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism, the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it. -- Mark Twain
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Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it. -- Mark Twain
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Where are there are two desires in a man's heart he has no choice between the two but must obey the strongest, there being no such thing as free will in the composition of any human being that ever lived. -- Mark Twain
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A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation. -- Mark Twain
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On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined. -- Mark Twain
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By common consent of all the nations and all the ages the most valuable thing in this world is the homage of men, whether deserved or undeserved. -- Mark Twain
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There's only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.' That was a dismal revelation to me; for my memory was never loaded with anything but blank cartridges. -- Mark Twain
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Who would find out that I am a natural fool if I kept always cool and never let nature come to the surface? Nobody. -- Mark Twain
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The way it is now, the asylums can hold the sane people, but if we tried to shut up the insane we should run out of building materials. -- Mark Twain
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It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval. -- Mark Twain
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We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print. -- Mark Twain
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Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others. -- Mark Twain
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I will remark in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is "hogwash" -- Mark Twain
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They have a grand mausoleum in Florence, which they built to bury our Lord and Saviour and the Medici family in. -- Mark Twain
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To place man properly at the present time, he stands somewhere between the angels and the French. -- Mark Twain
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The English youth's face simply showed a lively surprise, but nothing more. He went swinging along valleyward again, as if he did not know he had just swindled a coroner -- Mark Twain
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What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so. -- Mark Twain
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My mind changes often ... People who have no mind can easily be steadfast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo. -- Mark Twain
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Our heroes are men who do things which we recognize, with regret, and sometimes with a secret shame, that we cannot do. -- Mark Twain
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A few fly bites cannot stop a spirited horse. -- Mark Twain
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I could have become a soldier if I had waited; I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating. -- Mark Twain
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The sole impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs ... It is our only spur, our whip, our goad, our impelling power; we have no other. -- Mark Twain
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for he seemed only able to inhale it by thimblefuls, -- Mark Twain
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I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. -- Mark Twain
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He worked up his old battles and tricked them out with fresh splendors; also with new terrors, for he added artillery now. -- Mark Twain
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Ah, that shows you the power of music, that magician of magician, who lifts his wand and says his mysterious word and all things real pass away and the phantoms of your mind walk before you clothed in flesh. -- Mark Twain
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Intellectual food is like any other; it is pleasanter and more beneficial to take it with a spoon than a shovel. -- Mark Twain
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Switzerland is simply a large, lumpy, solid rock with a thin skin of grass stretched over it. -- Mark Twain
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The jury system puts a ban upon intelligence and honesty and a premium upon ignorance, stupidity and perjury. -- Mark Twain
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There will never be a "perfect" time to quit smoking. A time when you don't have any distractions or stress ... If you had started today one year ago, this would not even be an issue for you today! Don't waste another year! -- Mark Twain
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Had double chins all the way down to his stomach. -- Mark Twain
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There are those who would misteach us that to stick in a rut is consistency - and a virtue, and that to climb out of the rut is inconsistency - and a vice. -- Mark Twain
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We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty. -- Mark Twain
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If a stranger called and interrupted you, you said with your hearty tongue, "I'm glad to see you," and said with your heartier soul, "I wish you were with the cannibals and it was dinner-time." When -- Mark Twain
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There is no easy or quick plan to happiness, there is no single spot where you can start. Where you are right now is the best place to begin. -- Mark Twain
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It would not be possible for Noah to do in our day what he was permitted to do in his own ... The inspector would come and examine the Ark, and make all sorts of objections. -- Mark Twain
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All human rules are more or less idiotic. -- Mark Twain
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Unused talents gives you no advantage over someone who has no talent at all. -- Mark Twain
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thread, but it's black. -- Mark Twain
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More than once I had seen a noble who had gotten his enemy at a disadvantage stop to pray before cutting his throat. -- Mark Twain
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A friend is someone who stays in when the rest of the world has gone out. -- Mark Twain
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There has been much tragedy in my life; at least half of it actually happened. -- Mark Twain
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I've had a very difficult life. Fortunately, most of it didn't happen. -- Mark Twain
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It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. -- Mark Twain
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Use what you stand for and what you oppose as a foundation to write great content that resonates with readers and creates a ripple effect. -- Mark Twain
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There are not enough morally brave men in stock. We are out of moral-courage material; we are in a condition of profound poverty. -- Mark Twain
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That optimist of yours is always ready to turn hell's backyard into a play-ground. -- Mark Twain
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Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid. -- Mark Twain
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When all is said and done, the one sole condition that makes spiritual happiness and preserves it is the absence of doubt. -- Mark Twain
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Human nature is all alike. -- Mark Twain
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Eternal rest sounds comforting in the pulpit; well, you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands. -- Mark Twain
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It is plain that there is one moral law for heaven and another for the earth. The pulpit assures us that wherever we see suffering and sorrow, which we can relieve and do not, we sin, heavily. There was never yet a case of suffering or sorrow which God could not relieve. Does He sin then? -- Mark Twain
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A photograph is a most important document, and there is nothing more damning to go down to posterity than a silly, foolish smile caught and fixed forever. -- Mark Twain
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We are all beggars, each in his own way. -- Mark Twain
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Well, go 'long and play; but mind you get back some time in a week, or I'll tan you. -- Mark Twain
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Sometimes too much drink is barely enough. -- Mark Twain
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I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious
unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force. -- Mark Twain
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For he did not seem to know any way to do a person a kindness but by killing him. -- Mark Twain
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The primary rule of business success is loyalty to your employer. That's all right as a theory. What is the matter with loyalty to yourself? -- Mark Twain
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It is wiser to find out than to suppose. -- Mark Twain
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If there is one thing that will make a man peculiarly and insufferable self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick. -- Mark Twain
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But we love the Old Travelers. We love to hear them prate and drivel and lie. -- Mark Twain
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Never put off till tomorrow what may be done day after tomorrow just as well. -- Mark Twain
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Let us consider that we are all partially insane. It will explain us to each other; it will unriddle many riddles; it will make clear and simple many things which are involved in haunting and harassing difficulties and obscurities now. -- Mark Twain
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All our acts, reasoned and unreasoned, are selfish -- Mark Twain
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The world doesn't owe you anything. It was here first. -- Mark Twain
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Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins. -- Mark Twain
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The true pioneer of civilization is not the newspaper, not religion, not the railroad - but whiskey! -- Mark Twain
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In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true. -- Mark Twain
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Synergy - the bonus that is achieved when things work together harmoniously. -- Mark Twain
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And who has prayed for Satan? In eight hundred years, who has had the common decency to pray for the one sinner who needed it most? -- Mark Twain
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Great people are those who make others feel that they, too, can become great. -- Mark Twain
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Consider the average intelligence of the common man, then realize 50% are even stupider. -- Mark Twain
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When a man loves cats, I am his friend and comrade, without further introduction. -- Mark Twain
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It is impossible that a genius - at least a literary genius - can ever be discovered by his intimates; they are so close to him that he is out of focus to them and they can't get at his proportions; they can't perceive that there is any considerable difference between his bulk and their own. -- Mark Twain
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Only he who has seen better days and lives to see better days again knows their full value. -- Mark Twain
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The most interesting information come from children, for they tell all they know and then stop. -- Mark Twain
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The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet. It -- Mark Twain
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An ecstasy is a thing that will not go into words; it feels like music. -- Mark Twain
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My axiom is, to succeed in business: avoid my example. -- Mark Twain
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Evidence ... proves that prohibition only drives drunkenness behind closed doors and into dark places, and it does not cure it or even diminish it. -- Mark Twain
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Taking the pledge will not make bad liquor good, but it will improve it. -- Mark Twain
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If all men were rich, all men would be poor. -- Mark Twain
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I was born modest, but it didn't last. -- Mark Twain
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Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside. -- Mark Twain
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I never let my schoolin' interfere with my learnin' "_Mark Twain -- Mark Twain
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That which I have seen, in that little moment, will never go out from my memory, but will abide there; and I shall see it all the days, and dream of it all the nights, till I die. Would God I had been blind! -- Mark Twain
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Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag. -- Mark Twain
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It is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence. -- Mark Twain
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Who are we to create a heaven and hell for ourselves, excluding animals and plants in the bargain, just because we have the power to rationalize? -- Mark Twain
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When someone dies, it is like when your house burns down; it isn't for years that you realize the full extent of your loss. -- Mark Twain
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I have tried getting up early, and I have tried getting up late-and the latter agrees with me best. -- Mark Twain
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Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. -- Mark Twain
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Marriage
yes, it is the supreme felicity of life. I concede it. And it is also the supreme tragedy of life. The deeper the love the surer the tragedy. And the more disconsolating when it comes. -- Mark Twain
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I have learned that human existence is essentially tragic. It is only the love of God, disclosed and enacted in Christ, that redeems the human tragedy and makes it tolerable. No, more than tolerable. Wonderful. -- Mark Twain
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When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what this life is - heartbreaking bereavement. -- Mark Twain
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Their garment? Have they but one?"
"Ah, good your Worship, what would they do with more? Truly they have not two bodies each. -- Mark Twain
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It has always been a peculiarity of the human race that it keeps two sets of morals in stock-the private and the real, and the public and the artificial. -- Mark Twain
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Satan (impatiently) to Newcomer: The trouble with you Chicago people is, that you think you are the best people down here; whereas you are merely the most numerous. -- Mark Twain
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There are ten parts of speech and they are all troublesome. -- Mark Twain
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I set down in a chair by the window and tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn't no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. -- Mark Twain
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Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater. -- Mark Twain
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A body can't be too partic'lar how they talk 'bout these-yer dead people, Tom. -- Mark Twain
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Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it. -- Mark Twain
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A gentleman is a man who can play the banjo, but doesn't. -- Mark Twain
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The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils, but give me the banjo. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing helps scenery like bacon and eggs. -- Mark Twain
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Loyalty is a word which has worked vast harm; for it has been made to trick men into being "loyal" to a thousand iniquities, whereas the true loyalty should have been to themselves - in which case there would have ensured a rebellion, and the throwing off of that deceptive yoke. -- Mark Twain
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The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetics in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. -- Mark Twain
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When a man's dog turns against hime, it is time for his wife to pack her trunk and go home to mamma. -- Mark Twain
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It is our nature to conform; it is a force which not many can successfully resist. What is its seat? The inborn requirement of self-approval. -- Mark Twain
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A gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. -- Mark Twain
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Man is a marvelous curiosity ... he thinks he is the Creator's pet ... he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea? -- Mark Twain
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Next to possessing genius one's self is the power of appreciating it in others. -- Mark Twain
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When you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are . Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least. -- Mark Twain
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I have never seen what to me seemed an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet-I am inclined to expect one. -- Mark Twain
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I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not. -- Mark Twain
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Pilgrim's Progress , about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough. -- Mark Twain
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You should never trust a man who has only one way to spell a word. -- Mark Twain
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The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people. -- Mark Twain
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There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others. -- Mark Twain
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The window went up, a maid-servant's discordant voice profaned the holy calm, and a deluge of water drenched the prone martyr's remains! -- Mark Twain
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When we do not know a person - and also when we do - we have to judge his size by the size and nature of his achievements, as compared with the achievements of others in his special line of business - there is no other way. -- Mark Twain
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When they came it was as if the lord of the world had arrived, and had brought all the glories of its kingdoms along; and when they went they left a calm behind which was like the deep sleep which follows an orgy. -- Mark Twain
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You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs. -- Mark Twain
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The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness
your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture ... He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher. -- Mark Twain
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I think that to one in sympathy with nature, each season, in turn, seems the loveliest. -- Mark Twain
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Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened. -- Mark Twain
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Man was made at the end of the week's work when God was tired. -- Mark Twain
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And when he awoke in the morning and looked upon the wretchedness about him, his dream had had its usual effect: it had intensified the sordidness of his surroundings a thousandfold. -- Mark Twain
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The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty -- Mark Twain
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Sir Walter Scott created rank & caste in the South and also reverence for and pride and pleasure in them. Life on the Mississippi
Don Quixote swept admiration for medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence. Ivanhoe restored it. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi -- Mark Twain
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Well - Patriotism has its laws. And it also is a perfectly definite one, there are not vaguenesses about it. It commands that the brother over the border shall be sharply watched and brought to book every time he does us a hurt or offends us with an insult. -- Mark Twain
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Never knew before what eternity was made for. It is to give some of us a chance to learn German. -- Mark Twain
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A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read. -- Mark Twain
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I said nothing of the sort. -- Mark Twain
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There are some few people I respect and admire, but I don't think much of the species. -- Mark Twain
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She had the grit to pray for Judus if she took the
notion - there warn't no back-down to her, I judge. -- Mark Twain
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Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval - a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death. -- Mark Twain
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We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than Heredity Privilege. -- Mark Twain
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My parents were neither very poor nor conspicuously honest. -- Mark Twain
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Supposing is good, but finding out is better. -- Mark Twain
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In early times some sufferer had to sit up with a toothache, and he put in the time inventing the German language. -- Mark Twain
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There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer. -- Mark Twain
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True love is the only heart disease that is best left to "run on"
the only affection of the heart for which there is no help, and none desired. -- Mark Twain
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No narrative that tells the facts of a man's life in the man's own words can be uninteresting. -- Mark Twain
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Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it. -- Mark Twain
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I allowed silence to accumulate while I got my impressiveness together, -- Mark Twain
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No child should be permitted to grow up without exercise for imagination. It enriches life for him. It makes things wonderful and beautiful. -- Mark Twain
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Can it be possible that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin? -- Mark Twain
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I don't speak German well but several experts have assured me that I write it like an angel. Maybe so, maybe so- I don't know. I've not yet made any acquaintances among the angels. That comes later, whenever it please the Deity. I'm not in any hurry. -- Mark Twain
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There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it. -- Mark Twain
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A person who has during all time maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of the loftiest order. -- Mark Twain
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To this end it furnishes them an abundance of Catholic priests to teach them to be docile and obedient, and to be diligent in acquiring ignorance about things here below, and knowledge about the kingdom of heaven, -- Mark Twain
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They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it. -- Mark Twain
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I wonder if God created man because He was disappointed with the monkey. -- Mark Twain
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It is easier to stay out than to get out. -- Mark Twain
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That dismal prison house within whose dungeons so many young faces put on the wrinkles of age, -- Mark Twain
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They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin' ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property. -- Mark Twain
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I sometimes wonder if the world is run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who mean it. -- Mark Twain
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Light them both - I'll have to have one to see the other by. -- Mark Twain
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we felt very complacent and conceited, and better satisfied with life after we had added it to our list of things which we had seen and some other people had not. -- Mark Twain
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You must not pay a person a compliment, and then straightway follow it with a criticism. -- Mark Twain
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All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge. -- Mark Twain
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The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me. -- Mark Twain
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An honest politician is an oxymoron. -- Mark Twain
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Tout les jours you are coming some fresh game or other on me, mais vous ne pouvez pas play this savon dodge on me twice! -- Mark Twain
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There was a light behind him. He got up and stretched his neck out about a minute, listening. Then he says: "Who dah?" He listened some more; then he come tiptoeing down and stood right between us; we could a touched him, nearly. -- Mark Twain
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Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles -- Mark Twain
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Kindness is a language herd by deaf men and felt by blind men. -- Mark Twain
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Maybe not, maybe not. Cheer up, Becky, and let's go on trying. -- Mark Twain
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It is sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine times out of fifty nobody dares to call it, and you roll in the chips. -- Mark Twain
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Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, & those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied with drink. -- Mark Twain
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All I care to know about a man is that he is a human being ... he can't be any worse. -- Mark Twain
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Mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars. -- Mark Twain
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me that it had been many years since the world had been afforded the spectacle of a man adventurous enough to undertake -- Mark Twain
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I once heard a grouty northern invalid say that a coconut tree might be poetical, possibly it was; but it looked like a feather-duster struck by lightning. -- Mark Twain
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Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round - more than a body could tell what to do with. -- Mark Twain
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The most outrageous lies that can be invented will find believers if a person only tells them with all his might. -- Mark Twain
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We called him Barney for short. We couldn't use his real name, there wasn't time. -- Mark Twain
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We had an abundance of mangoes, papaias and bananas here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It has a soft pulp, like a pawpaw, and is eaten with a spoon. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing is made in vain, but the fly came near it. -- Mark Twain
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Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect). -- Mark Twain
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In light matters
matters of small consequence, like religion and politics and such things
he never acquired a conviction that could survive a disapproving remark from a cat. -- Mark Twain
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Don't say the old lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream. -- Mark Twain
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Humor is tragedy plus time. -- Mark Twain
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Rise early. It is the early bird that catches the worm. Don't be fooled by this absurd saw; I once knew a man who tried it. He got up at sunrise and a horse bit him. -- Mark Twain
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You can't reason with your heart; it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns. -- Mark Twain
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It is better to support schools than jails. -- Mark Twain
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It made one mad, for pleasure; and we could not take our eyes from him, and the looks that went out of our eyes came from our hearts, and their dumb speech was worship. -- Mark Twain
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I got some of their jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy - what would you think?" "I wouldn' think nuffn; I'd take en bust him over de head - dat -- Mark Twain
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People who love sausage and respect the law should never watch either being made. -- Mark Twain
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The difference between nonfiction and fiction is that fiction must be absolutely believable. -- Mark Twain
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Indeed, none but the Deity can tell what is good luck and what is bad before the returns are all in. -- Mark Twain
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There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist, except an old optimist. -- Mark Twain
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God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New
the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance. -- Mark Twain
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Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus. -- Mark Twain
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I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct, nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying. -- Mark Twain
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No throne exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only businesswise-merely as retail differs from wholesale. -- Mark Twain
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And now the tiresome chirping of a cricket that no human ingenuity could locate, began. Next the ghastly ticking of a death-watch in the wall at the bed's head made Tom shudder - it meant that somebody's days were numbered. -- Mark Twain
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Perhaps no poet is a conscious plagiarist, but there seems to be warrant for suspecting that there is no poet who is not at one time or another an unconscious one. -- Mark Twain
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Italy is the home of art and swindling; home of religion and moral rottenness -- Mark Twain
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Why will people be so stupid as to suppose themselves the only foreigners among a crowd of ten thousand persons? -- Mark Twain
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What is human life? The first third a good time; the rest remembering about it. -- Mark Twain
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When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years. -- Mark Twain
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I must have a prodigious amount of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up! -- Mark Twain
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I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week sometimes to make it up. ~Mark Twain, "The Innocents Abroad -- Mark Twain
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Don't let school interfere with your education. -- Mark Twain
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Some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, & over these ideals they dispute & cannot unite
but they all worship money. -- Mark Twain
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I do not mind Bedouins, - I am not afraid of them; because neither Bedouins nor ordinary Arabs have shown any disposition to harm us, but I do feel afraid of my own comrades. -- Mark Twain
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Ignorant people think it is the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it is the sickening grammar that they use. -- Mark Twain
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We consider that any man who can fiddle all through one of those Virginia Reels without losing his grip may be depended upon in any kind of musical emergency. -- Mark Twain
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No man, deep down in the privacy of his heart, has any considerable respect for himself. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing so liberalizes a man and expands the kindly instincts that nature put in him as travel and contact with many kinds of people. -- Mark Twain
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You can't keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year. -- Mark Twain
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One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it. -- Mark Twain
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I have only one moral precept; never smoke more than five cigars at a time. -- Mark Twain
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Until I came to New Mexico, I never realized how much beauty water adds to a river. -- Mark Twain
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The hotel-keeper, the postmaster, the blacksmith, the mayor, the constable, the city marshal and the principal citizen and property holder, all came out and greeted us cheerily, and we gave him good day. -- Mark Twain
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Most men die at 27, we just bury them at 72 -- Mark Twain
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The secret to success: find out where people are going and get there first -- Mark Twain
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Man is the only creature who has a nasty mind. -- Mark Twain
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There warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two, for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different. -- Mark Twain
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October: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February. -- Mark Twain
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We had a notion to get out and join the sixty soldiers, but upon reflecting that there were four hundred of the Indians, we concluded to go on and join the Indians. -- Mark Twain
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One of my theories is that the hearts of men are about alike, no matter what their skin color. -- Mark Twain
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My experience of men had long ago taught me that one of the surest ways of begetting an enemy was to do some stranger an act of kindness which should lay upon him the irritating sense of an obligation. -- Mark Twain
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There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act, until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it. -- Mark Twain
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When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: There is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. -- Mark Twain
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Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done. -- Mark Twain
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Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it. -- Mark Twain
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If the metrics you are looking at aren't useful in optimizing your strategy - stop looking at them. -- Mark Twain
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All you drunkards: Put down the intoxicating Vanity Metrics. -- Mark Twain
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When a man's dog turns against him it is time for a wife to pack her trunk and go home to mama. -- Mark Twain
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Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand -- Mark Twain
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Emperors, kings, artisians, peasens, big people
at the bottom we are all alike and all the same; all just alike on the inside, and when our clothes are off, nobody can tell which of us is which. -- Mark Twain
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You cannot have a theory without principles. Principles is another name for prejudices. -- Mark Twain
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Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training; the odds are too heavy. -- Mark Twain
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Women cannot receive even the most palpably judicious suggestion without arguing it; that is, married women. -- Mark Twain
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Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style. -- Mark Twain
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Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce. -- Mark Twain
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Great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they perform. -- Mark Twain
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Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement. -- Mark Twain
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I try never to let my schooling get in the way of my education. -- Mark Twain
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How superbly brave is the Englishman in the presence of the awfulest forms of danger and death; and how abject in the presence of any and all forms of hereditary rank. -- Mark Twain
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You may say organize, organize, organize; but there may be so much organization that it will interfere with the work to be done. -- Mark Twain
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When your watch gets out of order you have choice of two things to do: throw it in the fire or take it to the watch-tinker. The former is the quickest. -- Mark Twain
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I don't know of a single foreign product that enters this country untaxed, except the answer to prayer. -- Mark Twain
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There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate: when he can't afford it, and when he can. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing to be learned from the second kick of a mule. -- Mark Twain
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Geological time is not money. -- Mark Twain
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My father was a Saint Bernard, my mother was a Collie, but I am a Presbyterian. -- Mark Twain
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My heart goes out to anyone who is making his first appearance before an audience of human beings. -- Mark Twain
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The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin. -- Mark Twain
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People were thicker than bees, in those narrow streets, and the men were dressed in all the outrageous, outlandish, idolatrous, extravagant, thunder-and-lightning costumes that ever a tailor with the delirium tremens and seven devils could conceive of. There -- Mark Twain
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It is discouraging to try to penetrate a mind like yours. You ought to get it out and dance on it. That would take some of the rigidity out of it. -- Mark Twain
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Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. -- Mark Twain
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Deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie - I found that out. -- Mark Twain
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If I had more time, I would have written less. -- Mark Twain
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A railroad is like a lie you have to keep building it to make it stand. -- Mark Twain
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Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine. -- Mark Twain
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There has been only one Christian. They caught and curcified him-early. -- Mark Twain
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It is not what a man knows, but what he thinks of in time. -- Mark Twain
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Happiness ain't a thing in itself - it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. -- Mark Twain
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Ignorant as the unborne babe! ignorant as unborn twins! -- Mark Twain
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No brute ever does a cruel thing - that is the monopoly of those with the Moral Sense. -- Mark Twain
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Public Servant: Persons chosen by the people to distribute the graft. -- Mark Twain
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He is now rising from affluence to poverty. -- Mark Twain
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Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising. -- Mark Twain
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Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together! -- Mark Twain
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The circumstances and the atmosphere always have so much to do in directing a conversation, especially a German conversation, which is only a kind of an insurrection, anyway. -- Mark Twain
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There is only one good sex. The female one. -- Mark Twain
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Man is the only animal who blushes...or needs to. -- Mark Twain
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As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and ... Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards. -- Mark Twain
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Perfect grammar
persistent, continuous, sustained
is the fourth dimension, so to speak: many have sought it, but none has found it. -- Mark Twain
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Jim said he believed it was spirits, but I says: no, spirits wouldn't say "dern the dern fog". -- Mark Twain
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I don't have time to write you a short letter, so I'm writing you a long one instead. -- Mark Twain
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France has neither winter nor summer nor morals. Apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. -- Mark Twain
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The most permanent lessons in morals are those which come, not of book teaching, but of experience. -- Mark Twain
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Some people give their problems swimming lessons instead of drowning them. -- Mark Twain
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That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her. -- Mark Twain
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Humor is man's greatest blessing. -- Mark Twain
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Comparison is the death of joy. -- Mark Twain
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If ignorance is bliss, why isn't the world happier? -- Mark Twain
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It is yet another Civilized Power, with its banner of the Prince of Peace in one hand and its loot-basket and its butcher-knife in the other. Is there no salvation for us but to adopt Civilization and lift ourselves down to its level?. -- Mark Twain
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Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul. -- Mark Twain
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Children have but little charity for each other's defects. -- Mark Twain
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They was strong words but they was said and I let them stay said. -- Mark Twain
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Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions. -- Mark Twain
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Because in my nature I have always run to pie, whilst in his nature he has always run to mystery. -- Mark Twain
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Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere. -- Mark Twain
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I deal with temptation by yielding to it. -- Mark Twain
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There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.
Huck Finn -- Mark Twain
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There is a charm about the forbidden that makes it unspeakably desirable. -- Mark Twain
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The best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible. -- Mark Twain
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Under certain circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer. -- Mark Twain
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Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option. -- Mark Twain
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Let us change the tense for convenience. -- Mark Twain
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I haven't a particle of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty vices whatsoever. -- Mark Twain
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God was left out of the Constitution, but was furnished a front seat in this nations currency. ("In God we Trust") is a lie, this nations trust has always been with the dollar. -- Mark Twain
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I begin to see that a man's got to be in his own heaven to be happy. -- Mark Twain
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Love is an irreresisistible desire to be irresistibily desired. -- Mark Twain
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We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. Some think it the voice of God. -- Mark Twain
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I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them. -- Mark Twain
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The secret of success is making your vocation your vacation. -- Mark Twain
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No! You mean you're the late CHarlemagne; you must be six or seven hundred years old, at the very least."
"Trouble has done it, Bilgewater, trouble has done it; trouble has brung these gray hairs and this premature balditude. -- Mark Twain
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I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit. -- Mark Twain
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Every time I reform in one direction I go overboard in another. -- Mark Twain
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It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare. -- Mark Twain
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What's the use you learning to do right when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? -- Mark Twain
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Go to bed early, get up early-this is wise. -- Mark Twain
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From his cradle to his grave a man never does a single thing which has any FIRST AND FOREMOST object but one
to secure peace of mind, spiritual comfort, for HIMSELF. -- Mark Twain
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Humorists of the 'mere' sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration. -- Mark Twain
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The silent colossal National Lie that is the support and confederate of all the tyrannies and shams and inequalities and unfairnesses that afflict the peoples - that is the one to throw bricks and sermons at. -- Mark Twain
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When the time comes that a man has had his dinner, then the true man comes to the surface -- Mark Twain
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It is a good idea to obey all the rules when you're young just so you'll have the strength to break them when you're old. -- Mark Twain
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I realize from the cradle up I have been like the rest of the race - never quite sane in the night. -- Mark Twain
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A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human liberty. -- Mark Twain
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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore. -- Mark Twain
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Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar -- Mark Twain
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Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. -- Mark Twain
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Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please. -- Mark Twain
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Optimist: day-dreamer in his small clothes. -- Mark Twain
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I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land. -- Mark Twain
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But the lawyer he jumps on the table and yells, and says: "Gentlemen - gentlemen! Hear me just a word - just a single word - if you please!

There's one way yet - let's go and dig up the corpse and look. -- Mark Twain
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I DO know lots of things that I don't remember, and remember lots of things that I don't know. It's so with every educated person. -- Mark Twain
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Unexpected money is a delight. The same sum is a bitterness when you expected more. -- Mark Twain
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Genius, like gold and precious stones,
is chiefly prized because of its rarity. -- Mark Twain
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I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it. -- Mark Twain
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From the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this. -- Mark Twain
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But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason. -- Mark Twain
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Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven. -- Mark Twain
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You can never find a Christian who has acquired this valuable knowledge, this saving knowledge, by any process but the everlasting and all-sufficient 'people say.' -- Mark Twain
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The idea that no gentleman ever swears is all wrong. He can swear and still be a gentleman if he does it in a nice and benevolent and affectionate way. -- Mark Twain
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It is a mystery that is hidden from me by reason that the emergency requiring the fathoming of it hath not in my life-days occurred, and so, not having no need to know this thing, I abide barren of the knowledge. -- Mark Twain
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Tight pants are just uncomfortable. -- Mark Twain
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The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for. -- Mark Twain
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In Honolulu, I saw cats, individual cats, groups of cats, platoons of cats, companies of cats, regiments of cats, armies of cats, multitudes of cats, millions of cats, and all of them sleek, fat, lazy and sound asleep. -- Mark Twain
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Men write many fine and plausible arguments in support of monarchy, but the fact remains that where every man has a voice, brutal laws are impossible -- Mark Twain
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That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane; not in all things, but in religious matters. -- Mark Twain
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Learning to play two pairs is worth about as much as a college education, and about as costly. -- Mark Twain
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The administration of the law can never go lax where every individual sees to it that it grows not lax in his own case, or in cases which fall under his eyes. -- Mark Twain
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The only people who should use the possessive 'we' are kings, newspaper editors, and persons with tapeworms. -- Mark Twain
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An occultation of Venus is not half so difficult as an eclipse of the sun, but because it comes seldom the world thinks it's a grand thing. -- Mark Twain
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If smoking cigars is not permitted in heaven, I won't go. -- Mark Twain
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I prefer milk because I am a Prohibitionist, but I do not go to it for inspiration. -- Mark Twain
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You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. -- Mark Twain
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No country can be well governed unless its citizens as a body keep religiously before their minds that they are the guardians of the law, and that the law officers are only the machinery for its execution, nothing more. -- Mark Twain
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Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime. -- Mark Twain
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Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself. -- Mark Twain
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You will be more disappointed in life by the things that you do not do than by the things that you do. -- Mark Twain
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It's easy to make friends, but hard to get rid of them. -- Mark Twain
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My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it. -- Mark Twain
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Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. -- Mark Twain
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We are so strangely made; the memories that could make us happy pass away; it is the memories that break our hearts that abide. -- Mark Twain
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Begin at the beginning, go on until the end, then stop. -- Mark Twain
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There is no such thing as an ordinary life. -- Mark Twain
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The most difficult We do not deal in facts when we are contemplating ourselves. -- Mark Twain
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She was as simple-hearted and honest as the day was long, and so she was an easy victim. She gathered together her quack periodicals and her quack medicines, and thus armed with death, went about on her pale horse, metaphorically speaking, with hell following after. -- Mark Twain
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Let your joy be unconfined! -- Mark Twain
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Books are for people who wish they were somewhere else. -- Mark Twain
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Chastity - you can carry it too far. -- Mark Twain
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I think a compliment ought always to precede a complaint, where one is possible, because it softens resentment and insures for the complaint a courteous and gentle reception. -- Mark Twain
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I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want. -- Mark Twain
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While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats. -- Mark Twain
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He charged nothing for his preaching and it was worth it too. -- Mark Twain
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men's misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This -- Mark Twain
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If we only had some God in the country's laws, instead of being in such a sweat to get him into the Constitution, it would be better all around. -- Mark Twain
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Civilizations proceed from the heart rather than from the head. -- Mark Twain
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It is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and not kick. -- Mark Twain
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The size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider's measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it. -- Mark Twain
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What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything. -- Mark Twain
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A joke, even if it be a lame one, is nowhere so keenly relished or quickly applauded as in a murder trial. -- Mark Twain
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Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. -- Mark Twain
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To believe yourself brave is to be brave; it is the one only essential thing. -- Mark Twain
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kind. It was the most singular, and almost the most touching and melancholy exile that fancy can imagine. - One of -- Mark Twain
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Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself. -- Mark Twain
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If You don't read good books, then you are no better than an unlettered Man -- Mark Twain
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It is my custom to keep on talking until I get the audience cowed. -- Mark Twain
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In German, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has -- Mark Twain
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To be satisfied with what one has; that is wealth. As long as one sorely needs a certain additional amount, that man isn't rich. -- Mark Twain
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There are two reasons why anybody buys anything. The real reason, and the reason they give you. -- Mark Twain
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To avoid lying, do nothing that needs covering. -- Mark Twain
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Blasphemy? No, it is not blashphemy. If God is as vast as that, he is above blasphemy; if he is as little as that, He is beneath it. -- Mark Twain
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The trouble with the world is not that people know too little; it's that they know so many things that just aren't so. -- Mark Twain
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Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible. -- Mark Twain
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All the modern inconveniences ... -- Mark Twain
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Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule. -- Mark Twain
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A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors. -- Mark Twain
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It gave an appalling idea of the value of an hour, and I thought I could never waste one again without remorse and terror. -- Mark Twain
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She said all a body would have to do there [Heaven] was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. -- Mark Twain
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Be wise as a serpent and wary as a dove! -- Mark Twain
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The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted. -- Mark Twain
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Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded. -- Mark Twain
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So I held on till all the late sounds had quit and the early ones hadn't begun yet; and then I slipped down the ladder. -- Mark Twain
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We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter. -- Mark Twain
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What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin. -- Mark Twain
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It is easier to stay out than get out. -- Mark Twain
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Adam did not want the apple for the apple's sake; he wanted it because it was forbidden. -- Mark Twain
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I happened to think of something. I knowed mighty well that a drownded man don't float on his back, but on his face. So I knowed, then, that this warn't pap, but a woman dressed up in a man's clothes. So -- Mark Twain
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A new-comer of any age or either sex was an impressive curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. -- Mark Twain
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If you want me to give you a two-hour presentation, I am ready today. If you want only a five-minute speech, it will take me two weeks to prepare. -- Mark Twain
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Both marriage and death ought to be welcome: the one promises happiness, doubtless the other assures it. -- Mark Twain
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Not until you become a stranger to yourself will you be able to make acquaintance with the Friend. -- Mark Twain
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The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede. -- Mark Twain
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None but the dead have free speech. -- Mark Twain
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God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. -- Mark Twain
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The symbol of the race ought to be a human being carrying an ax, for every human being has one concealed about him somewhere, and is always seeking the opportunity to grind it. -- Mark Twain
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When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always 20 years behind the times. -- Mark Twain
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What connection is there, President, between this uncanny creature and the disappearance of Lord Beltham, of which we were talking at dinner? -- Mark Twain
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I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened. -- Mark Twain
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A consciously exaggerated compliment is an offense. -- Mark Twain
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Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. -- Mark Twain
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The minute we get reconciled to a person, how willing we are to throw aside little needless punctilios and pronounce his name right. -- Mark Twain
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Slang in a woman's mouth is not obscene, it only sounds so. -- Mark Twain
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It is an important thing, in our never-ending pursuit of happiness, to stop and just be happy for a while. -- Mark Twain
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Have a place for everything and keep the thing somewhere else. This is not advice, it is merely custom. -- Mark Twain
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There is no other life; life itself is only a vision and a dream for nothing exists but space and you. If there was an all-powerful God, he would have made all good, and no bad. -- Mark Twain
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Every man is in his own person the whole human race without a detail lacking ... I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born. -- Mark Twain
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diplomacy is simply the name we have agreed to give to lying about national affairs. I -- Mark Twain
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If there is a God, he is a malign thug. -- Mark Twain
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But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most? -- Mark Twain
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Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world. -- Mark Twain
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Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. -- Mark Twain
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After all these years, I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning; it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her. -- Mark Twain
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appeared in any form. In it my purpose has been to present -- Mark Twain
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I thoroughly believe that any man who's got anything worthwhile to say will be heard if he only says it often enough. -- Mark Twain
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A proof once established is better left so. -- Mark Twain
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Never mistake motion for progress. -- Mark Twain
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The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up. -- Mark Twain
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When an audience does not complain, it is a compliment, and when it does, it is a compliment, too, if unaccompanied by violence. -- Mark Twain
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Hero: Person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it. -- Mark Twain
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One should be gentle with the ignorant, for they are the chosen of God. -- Mark Twain
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Every man has a secret ambition: To outsmart horses, fish and women. -- Mark Twain
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It is easy to make plans in this world; even a cat can do it; and when one is out in those remote oceans it is noticeable that a cat's plans and a man's are worth about the same. There is much the same shrinkage in both, in the matter of values. -- Mark Twain
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I purpose publishing these Letters here in the world before I return to you. Two editions. One, unedited, for Bible readers and their children; the other, expurgated, for persons of refinement -- Mark Twain
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Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms. -- Mark Twain
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The low level which commercial morality has reached in America is deplorable. We have humble God fearing Christian men among us who will stoop to do things for a million dollars that they ought not to be willing to do for less than 2 millions. -- Mark Twain
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In this same library we saw some drawings by Michael Angelo (these Italians call him Mickel Angelo,) and Leonardo da Vinci. (They spell it Vinci and pronounce it Vinchy; foreigners always spell better than they pronounce.) -- Mark Twain
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Life is but a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. -- Mark Twain
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My advice to girls: first, don't smoke - to excess; second, don't drink - to excess; third, don't marry - to excess. -- Mark Twain
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The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it. -- Mark Twain
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Independence-is loyalty to one's best self and principles, and this is often disloyalty to the general idols and fetishes. -- Mark Twain
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The ancients stole all our ideas from us. -- Mark Twain
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Every person is a book, each year a chapter, -- Mark Twain
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Well, there was a sort of bastard justice in his view of the case, and so I dropped the matter. When you can't cure a disaster by argument, what is the use to argue? -- Mark Twain
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If it would not look too much like showing off, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is. -- Mark Twain
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Hunger is the handmaid of genius -- Mark Twain
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If men bore children, there would only be one born in each family. -- Mark Twain
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Virtue never has been as respectable as money. -- Mark Twain
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Shall we go on conferring our Civilization upon the peoples that sit in darkness, or shall we give those poor things a rest? -- Mark Twain
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I've never let my school interfere with my education. -- Mark Twain
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Don't go to sleep, so many people die there. -- Mark Twain
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I asked Tom if countries always apologized when they had done wrong, and he says - "Yes; the little ones does". -- Mark Twain
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he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He -- Mark Twain
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We must take things as we find them in this world. -- Mark Twain
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Ah, if he could only die temporarily! -- Mark Twain
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No man that has ever lived has done a thing to please God
primarily. It was done to please himself, then God next. -- Mark Twain
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Do one thing every day you don't want to do. -- Mark Twain
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Circumstances make man, not man circumstances. -- Mark Twain
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The machine has several virtues ... One may lean back in his chair and work it. It piles an awful stack of words on one page. It don't muss things or scatter ink blots around. -- Mark Twain
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Don't dream your life, but live your dream -- Mark Twain
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Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health. -- Mark Twain
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Education that consists in learning things and not the meaning of them is feeding upon the husks and not the corn -- Mark Twain
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People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases. -- Mark Twain
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If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man. -- Mark Twain
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The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become. -- Mark Twain
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Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean. -- Mark Twain
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I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way. -- Mark Twain
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They say that you can't live by bread alone, but I can live on compliments. -- Mark Twain
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I find that, as a rule, when a thing is a wonder to us it is not because of what we see in it, but because of what others have seen in it. We get almost all our wonders at second hand. -- Mark Twain
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The dream vocabulary shaves meanings finer and closer than do the world's daytime dictionaries. -- Mark Twain
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Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization-one for home consumption and one for the heathen market? -- Mark Twain
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I would do it myself, but my intelligence is out of repair ... -- Mark Twain
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One wearies of everything in this world, even happiness. Did -- Mark Twain
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Grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religion they were brought up in. -- Mark Twain
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So I hove a brick through his window... -- Mark Twain
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Most people are bothered by those passages of Scripture they do not understand, but the passages that bother me are those I do understand. -- Mark Twain
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It usually takes me two or three days to prepare an impromptu speech. -- Mark Twain
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You are a coward when you even seem to have backed down from a thing you openly set out to do -- Mark Twain
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Labor in loneliness is irksome. -- Mark Twain
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Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever. -- Mark Twain
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Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson. -- Mark Twain
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There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind-the humorous. -- Mark Twain
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We can't always have the beautiful aspect of things. Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful and let the others go -- Mark Twain
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Whenever the literary german dives into a sentence, this is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his atlantic with his verb in his mouth. -- Mark Twain
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Seventy is old enough. After that there is too much risk. -- Mark Twain
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The finest clothing made is a person's own skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this. -- Mark Twain
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The cigar-box which the European calls a 'lift' needs but to be compared with our elevators to be appreciated. The lift stops to reflect between floors. That is all right in a hearse, but not in elevators. The American elevator acts like a man's patent purge-it works. -- Mark Twain
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ferry landing, found -- Mark Twain
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Nothing so focuses the mind as the prospect of being hanged. -- Mark Twain
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And how moving is the eloquence of the untaught when it is the heart that is speaking! -- Mark Twain
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Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured. -- Mark Twain
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I did not steal your paltry goods! -- Mark Twain
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One compliment can keep me going for a whole month. -- Mark Twain
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I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. -- Mark Twain
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The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name. -- Mark Twain
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Jesus died to save men - a small thing for an immortal to do - and didn't save many, anyway. But if he had been damned for the race, that would have been act of a size proper to a god, and would have saved the whole race. -- Mark Twain
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I can always tell which is the front end of a horse, but beyond that, my art is not above the ordinary. -- Mark Twain
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When I reflect upon the number of disagreeable people who have gone on to a better world, I am moved to lead a different life. -- Mark Twain
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Laughter is the greatest weapon we have and we, as humans, use it the least. -- Mark Twain
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It know we have a fashion of saying "such and such an event was the turning-point in my life," but we shouldn't say it. We should merely grant that its place as LAST link in the chain makes it the most CONSPICUOUS link; in real importance it has no advantage over any one of its predecessors. -- Mark Twain
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Broad, wholesome, charitable views .. can not be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth. -- Mark Twain
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Everybody lies ... every day, every hour, awake, asleep, in his dreams, in his joy, in his mourning. If he keeps his tongue still his hands, his feet, his eyes, his attitude will convey deception. -- Mark Twain
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Of all the things I've lost, I miss my mind the most. -- Mark Twain
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I am content to be a bric-a-bracker and a Ceramiker. -- Mark Twain
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There is no humor in heaven. -- Mark Twain
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Polished air-tight stove (new and deadly invention), -- Mark Twain
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You see, he knew his own laws just as other people so often know the laws: by words, not by effects. They take a meaning, and get to be very vivid, when you come to apply them to yourself. -- Mark Twain
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The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane. -- Mark Twain
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This editor is a critic. He has pulled out his carving-knife and his tomahawk and is starting after a book which he is going to have for breakfast. -- Mark Twain
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I cannot keep from talking, even at the risk of being instructive. -- Mark Twain
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He is useless on top of the ground; he ought to be under it, inspiring the cabbages. -- Mark Twain
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Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough. -- Mark Twain
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You know my present way of life. Can you suggest any additions to it, in the way of crime, that will reasonably insure my going to some other place. -- Mark Twain
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Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to. -- Mark Twain
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Try the mustard, - a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard. -- Mark Twain
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If you need help identifying actionable analytics check out this post. -- Mark Twain
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In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, one when he was a boy and one when he was a man -- Mark Twain
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We like to read about rich people in the newspapers; the papers know it, and they do their best to keep this appetite liberally fed. -- Mark Twain
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If you're looking for friends when you need them ... it's too late. -- Mark Twain
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Drop this mean and sordid and selfish devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up something to do that's got some dignity to it! Risk your souls! Risk them in good causes; then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform! -- Mark Twain
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Implore him to be a merciful ass and trample his duty under foot. -- Mark Twain
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will say this much for the nobility: that, tyrannical, murderous, rapacious, and morally rotten as they were, they were deeply and enthusiastically religious. Nothing could divert them from the regular and faithful performance of the pieties enjoined by the Church. More -- Mark Twain
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It must be well-nigh a maximum of sense to behave so that one escapes being hanged. -- Mark Twain
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This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth. -- Mark Twain
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I never smoke to excess - that is, I smoke in moderation, only one cigar at a time. -- Mark Twain
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Some people scorn a cat and think it not an essential; but the Clemens tribe are not of these. -- Mark Twain
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Faith is believing things you know aint true -- Mark Twain
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He said if I warn't so ignorant, but had read a book called Don Quixote, I would know without asking. He said it was all done by -- Mark Twain
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We never knew an ignorant person yet but was prejudiced. -- Mark Twain
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Bekase why: would a wise man ant to live in de mid's er such a blimblammin' all de time? No
'deed he wouldn't. A wise man 'ud take en buil' a biler-factry; en den he could shet down de biler-factory when he want to res'. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing agrees with me. If I drink coffee, it gives me dyspepsia; if I drink wine, it gives me the gout; if I go to church, it gives me dysentery. -- Mark Twain
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Never miss an opportunity to shut up. -- Mark Twain
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We have the best government that money can buy. -- Mark Twain
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We all know about the habits of the ant, we know all about the habits of the bee, but we know nothing at all about the habits of the oyster. It seems almost certain that we have been choosing the wrong time for studying the oyster. -- Mark Twain
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Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. -- Mark Twain
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The only certainties in life are death and taxes. -- Mark Twain
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Any established church is an established crime, an established slave pen. -- Mark Twain
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The first time a student realizes that a little learning is a dangerous thing is when he brings home a poor report card. -- Mark Twain
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If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time. -- Mark Twain
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We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain. -- Mark Twain
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Quitting smoking is easy, I've done it hundreds of times. -- Mark Twain
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Your lip," says he. "You've put on considerable many frills since I been away. I'll take you down -- Mark Twain
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Honest men are few when it comes to themselves. -- Mark Twain
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In statesmanship get formalities right, never mind about the moralities. -- Mark Twain
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A dream ... I was trying to explain to St. Peter, and was doing it in the German tongue, because I didn't want to be too explicit. -- Mark Twain
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I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved. -- Mark Twain
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That which was hard to endure is sweet to remember. -- Mark Twain
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The old man laughed loud and joyously, shook up the details of his anatomy from head to foot, and ended by saying that such a laugh was money in a man's pocket, because it cut down the doctor's bills like everything. -- Mark Twain
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It don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. -- Mark Twain
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We are all alike on the inside. -- Mark Twain
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Conformity - the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority. -- Mark Twain
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A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment. -- Mark Twain
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Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die. -- Mark Twain
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Great books are weighted and measured by their style and matter, and not the trimmings and shadings of their grammar. -- Mark Twain
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It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want - oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so! -- Mark Twain
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All kings is mostly rapscallions, as fur as I can make out. -- Mark Twain
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Plain question and plain answer make the shortest road out of most perplexities. -- Mark Twain
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All the first years, their only question had been
asked with beseechings and tears that might have moved stone, in time, perhaps, but hearts are not stones: "Is he alive?" "Is she alive? -- Mark Twain
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When you catch an adjective, kill it. -- Mark Twain
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Some civilized women would lose half their charm without dress and some would lose all of it. -- Mark Twain
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It is more trouble to make a maxim than it is to do right. -- Mark Twain
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The moral sense enables one to perceive morality, and avoid it. The immoral sense enables one to perceive immorality and enjoy it. -- Mark Twain
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A habit cannot be tossed out the window; it must be coaxed down the stairs a step at a time. -- Mark Twain
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But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time. -- Mark Twain
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Death is to life as heaven is to hell they're both dependent on each other -- Mark Twain
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There are women who have an indefinable charm in their faces which makes them beautiful to their intimates, but a cold stranger who tried to reason the matter out and find this beauty would fail. -- Mark Twain
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Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once. -- Mark Twain
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Temperate temperance is best; intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance. -- Mark Twain
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Don't you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always happens? -- Mark Twain
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How blind and unreasoning and arbitrary are some of the laws of nature - the most of them, in fact! -- Mark Twain
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The fear of lightning is one of the most distressing infirmities a human being can be afflicted with. It is mostly confined to women, but now and then you find it in a little dog, and sometimes a man. -- Mark Twain
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There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages. -- Mark Twain
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Health is a habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. -- Mark Twain
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Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed down-stairs one step at a time. -- Mark Twain
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He denounced him openly as a charlatan
a fraud with no valuable knowledge of any kind, or powers beyond those of an ordinary and rather inferior human being. -- Mark Twain
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It is a wise child that knows its own father, and an unusual one that unreservedly approves of him. -- Mark Twain
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Had studied law an entire week, and then given it up because it was so prosy and tiresome. -- Mark Twain
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Do not bring your dog. (advice for attending a funeral) -- Mark Twain
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For we were little Christian children and early learned the value of forbidden fruit. -- Mark Twain
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The average man don't like trouble and danger. -- Mark Twain
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Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century. -- Mark Twain
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All you need is ignorance and confidence and the success is sure. -- Mark Twain
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It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals. -- Mark Twain
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The secret of making progress is to get started. -- Mark Twain
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There is not a single celebrated Southern name in any of the departments of human industry except those of war, assassination, lynching, murder, the duel, repudiation, & massacre. -- Mark Twain
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Kings" and "Kingdoms" were as thick in Britain as they had been in little Palestine in Joshua's time, when people had to sleep with their knees pulled up because they couldn't stretch out without a passport. -- Mark Twain
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Courts musn't interfere and separate families if they could help it. Said he'd druther not take a child away from its father. -- Mark Twain
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You can't pray a lie" Huck Finn -- Mark Twain
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Human beings can be awful cruel to one another. -- Mark Twain
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I reck'n I knows what I knows. -- Mark Twain
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I know I am not capable of suffering more than I did during those few minutes of suspense in the dark, surrounded by those creeping, bloody-minded tarantulas. I -- Mark Twain
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The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done. -- Mark Twain
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There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence. -- Mark Twain
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The nation is divided, half patriots and half traitors, and no man can tell which from which. -- Mark Twain
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Let us live so that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. -- Mark Twain
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Prosperity is the best protector of principle. -- Mark Twain
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One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed it. They also believed the world was flat. -- Mark Twain
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If there is one thing that is really cheerful in the world, it is cheerfulness. I have noticed it often. And I have noticed that when a man is right down cheerful, he is seldom unhappy for the time being. Such is the nature of man. -- Mark Twain
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But the people cannot have wells, and so they take rain-water. Neither can they conveniently have cellars or graves, the town being built upon "made ground"; so they do without both, and few of the living complain, and none of the others. -- Mark Twain
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Strange is the man who practices his religion. -- Mark Twain
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From the dome of St. Peter's one can see every notable object in Rome ... He can see a panorama that is varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history than any other in Europe. -- Mark Twain
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Christianity will doubtless still survive in the earth ten centuries hence- stuffed and in a museum. -- Mark Twain
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Always do what is right. It will gratify half of mankind and astound the other. -- Mark Twain
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Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest. -- Mark Twain
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Of course, no man is entirely in his right mind at any time. -- Mark Twain
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A woman springs a sudden reproach upon you which provokes a hot retort, and then she will presently ask you to apologize. -- Mark Twain
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Like most people, I often feel mean, and act accordingly. -- Mark Twain
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A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top. -- Mark Twain
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Be careless in your dress if you will, but keep a tidy soul. -- Mark Twain
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She was not quite what you would call refined.
She was not quite what you would call unrefined.
She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot. -- Mark Twain
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When you find yourself on the side of the majority, you should pause and reflect. -- Mark Twain
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Dance like nobody's looking. -- Mark Twain
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Drawing on my fine command of language, I said nothing. -- Mark Twain
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Wherefore being all of one mind, we do highly resolve that government of the grafted by the grafter for the grafter shall not perish from the earth. -- Mark Twain
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It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork. -- Mark Twain
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The more you join with people in their joys and their sorrows, the more nearer and dearer they come to be to you. -- Mark Twain
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Tomorrow night I appear for the first time before a Boston audience - 4000 critics. -- Mark Twain
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If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter. -- Mark Twain
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Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved. -- Mark Twain
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If I'd seen a playwright ever write an' play at the same time, I'd have given 'em more of a chance at cards. Can I get an 'amen?' -- Mark Twain
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But it seems to be a law of human constitution that those that deserve shall not have and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having. -- Mark Twain
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Writing is the easiest thing in the world ... Just try it sometime. I sit up with a pipe in my mouth and a board on my knees and I scribble away. -- Mark Twain
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It is often the case that a man who can't tell a lie thinks he is the best judge of one. -- Mark Twain
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We are always too busy for our children; we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them; but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly. -- Mark Twain
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So it shows that for all the brag you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of it for real unerringness. Jim says the same. -- Mark Twain
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How far we travel in life matters far less than those we meet along the way. -- Mark Twain
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A half-educated physician is not valuable. He thinks he can cure everything. -- Mark Twain
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If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which fails to show up one or more members & beneficiaries of our Civilization as promenading with his shirt-tail up & the rest of his regalia in the wash. -- Mark Twain
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'Classic' - a book which people praise and don't read. -- Mark Twain
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Foo-foo the First, King of the Mooncalves! -- Mark Twain
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If I cannot smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
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God cures and the doctor sends the bill. -- Mark Twain
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I think the Cincinnati Enquirer must be edited by children. -- Mark Twain
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I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute. -- Mark Twain
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But old fools is the biggest fools there is. -- Mark Twain
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One must travel, to learn. -- Mark Twain
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The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is a gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite as bad as the Northern imitation of it. -- Mark Twain
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You cant reach old age by another man's road, my habits protect my life but they would assassinate you -- Mark Twain
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It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races. -- Mark Twain
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The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid. -- Mark Twain
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Wrinkles should merely indicate where the smiles have been. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits. -- Mark Twain
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They do say that when a man starts down hill everybody is ready to help him with a kick, and I suppose it is so. -- Mark Twain
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The average human being is a perverse creature; and when he isn't that, he is a practical joker. The result to the other person concerned is about the same: that is, he is made to suffer. -- Mark Twain
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Great things can happen when you don't care who gets the credit. -- Mark Twain
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I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache; and what is more, I never intend to have it. -- Mark Twain
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For business reasons, I must preserve the outward signs of sanity. -- Mark Twain
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To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with. -- Mark Twain
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Vote: The only commodity that is peddleable without a license. -- Mark Twain
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The Impartial Friend: Death, the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all
the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved. -- Mark Twain
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History may not repeat, but it often rhymes. -- Mark Twain
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In both instances [a car coming out of the Himalayas and tobogganning] the sensation was pleasurable
intensely so; it was a sudden and immense exaltation, a mixed ecstasy of deadly fright and unimaginable joy. I believe that this combination makes the perfection of human delight. -- Mark Twain
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So the tiresome minutes and decades of minutes dragged away, until at last our tense forms filmed over with a dulled consciousness, -- Mark Twain
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If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He; for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries
and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, "As unhappy as God." -- Mark Twain
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The existing phrasebooks are inadequate. They are well enough as far as they go, but when you fall down and skin your leg they don't tell you what to say. -- Mark Twain
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A jay hasnt got any more principle than a Congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise. -- Mark Twain
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The best of us would rather be popular than right. -- Mark Twain
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The Southern heart is too impulsive; Southern hospitality is too lavish with the stranger.
- The Spirit of Tennessee Journalism -- Mark Twain
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We must look for our own blame to find our own personality. -- Mark Twain
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None but an ass pays a compliment and asks a favour at the same time. There are many asses. -- Mark Twain
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We get our morals from books. I didn't get mine from books, but I know that morals do come from books- theoretically at least. -- Mark Twain
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In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel. -- Mark Twain
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I would rather go to bed with Lillian Russell stark naked than Ulysses S Grant in full military regalia. -- Mark Twain
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To my mind that literature is best and most enduring which is characterized by a noble simplicity. -- Mark Twain
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Imagination labors best in distant fields. -- Mark Twain
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Education is what remains when what is learned has been taken away. -- Mark Twain
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Wagner has some great moments, but a lot of miserable half hours. -- Mark Twain
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You can't no more teach what you ain't learned than you can come from where you ain't been. -- Mark Twain
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My sister ... was an interested and zealous invalid during sixty-five years, tried all the new diseases as fast as they came out, and always enjoyed the newest one more than any that went before; my brother had accumulated forty-two brands of Christianity before he was called away. -- Mark Twain
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Profound silence; silence so deep that even their breathings were conspicuous in the hush. -- Mark Twain
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Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. -- Mark Twain
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Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom. -- Mark Twain
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Old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can't learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. -- Mark Twain
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My experience with horses is that they never throw away a chance to go lame. -- Mark Twain
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Go to heaven for the climate -- Mark Twain
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Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself. She gave that look, and carried it away to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong. -- Mark Twain
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Let me make the superstitions of a nation and I care not who makes its laws or its songs either. -- Mark Twain
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Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him; a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market. -- Mark Twain
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A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditch digging. -- Mark Twain
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What a lie it is to call this a free country, where none but the unworthy and undeserving may swear. -- Mark Twain
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The heart is the real fountain of youth. -- Mark Twain
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If your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. -- Mark Twain
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Definite speech means clarity of mind. -- Mark Twain
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Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure. -- Mark Twain
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It is curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing, nickel-plated word has for you. -- Mark Twain
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Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted; one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new. -- Mark Twain
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You cannot surprise an individual more than twice with the same marvel -- Mark Twain
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I would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective. -- Mark Twain
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The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right. -- Mark Twain
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Carlyle said 'a lie cannot live.' It shows that he did not know how to tell them. -- Mark Twain
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Today's burdens can strengthen you for tomorrow. -- Mark Twain
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Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame. -- Mark Twain
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Mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty - to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it. -- Mark Twain
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The very next morning at daylight such parties are sure to be found lying up some back alley, contentedly waiting for the hearse. -- Mark Twain
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My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got. -- Mark Twain
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A great, great deal has been said about the weather, but very little has ever been done. -- Mark Twain
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The longing of my heart is a fairy portrait of myself: I want to be pretty; I want to eliminate facts and fill up the gap with charms. -- Mark Twain
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Our best built certainties are but sand-houses and subject to damage from any wind of doubt that blows -- Mark Twain
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I desire to tamper with the jury law. I wish to alter it as to put a premium on intelligence and character, and close the jury box against idiots, blacklegs, and people who do not read newspapers. -- Mark Twain
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I have replaced his tin life with a silver-gilt fiction -- Mark Twain
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Wit and Humor - if any difference, it is in duration - lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently; but one is vivid, and can do damage - the other fools along and enjoys elaboration. -- Mark Twain
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We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things. -- Mark Twain
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Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason. -- Mark Twain
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It used to take me all vacation to grow a new hide in place of the one they flogged off me during school term. -- Mark Twain
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Tom's whole being applauded this idea. It was deep, and dark, and awful; the hour, the circumstances, the surroundings, were in keeping with it. -- Mark Twain
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If you can't stand solitude, perhaps others find you boring as well. -- Mark Twain
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Even popularity can be overdone. In Rome, along at first, you are full of regrets that Michelangelo died; but by and by, you only regret that you didn't see him do it. -- Mark Twain
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I've had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened. -- Mark Twain
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God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board. -- Mark Twain
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It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened. -- Mark Twain
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I never write metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop. -- Mark Twain
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I've experienced a great deal of pain and suffering in my life ... most of which has never happened. -- Mark Twain
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School gets in the way of my learning. -- Mark Twain
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He gossips habitually; he lacks the common wisdom to keep still that deadly enemy of man, his own tongue. -- Mark Twain
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Why is it that, among men, physical courage is a trait so plenteous yet moral courage is a trait so rare? -- Mark Twain
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Figures don't lie, but liars figure. -- Mark Twain
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Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination. -- Mark Twain
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Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination. -- Mark Twain
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One frequently only finds out how really beautiful a women is, until
after considerable acquaintance with her. -- Mark Twain
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War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull. -- Mark Twain
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Well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they can't sleep anyhow. -- Mark Twain
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You aim for the palace and get drowned in the sewer. -- Mark Twain
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Travel has no longer any charm for me. I have seen all the foreign countries I want to except heaven & hell & I have only a vague curiosity about one of those. -- Mark Twain
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It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue (German) ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it. -- Mark Twain
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If you must be indiscrete, be discrete in your indiscretion. -- Mark Twain
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People don't really read your books, they only say they do, to keep you from feeling bad. -- Mark Twain
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Love your enemy, it will scare the hell out of them. -- Mark Twain
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I'll not go where there is any of that sort of thing going on, again. It's the sure way, and the only sure way; -- Mark Twain
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Salle. The white man and the red man struck hands and entertained each other during three days. Then, to the admiration -- Mark Twain
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The partitions of the houses were so thin we could hear the women occupants of adjoining rooms changing their minds. -- Mark Twain
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A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty. -- Mark Twain
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I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the "lower animals" (so called) and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me. -- Mark Twain
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The trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades. -- Mark Twain
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It is some more Moral Sense. The proprietors are rich, and very holy; but the wage they pay to these poor brothers and sisters of theirs is only enough to keep them from dropping dead with hunger. -- Mark Twain
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Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her. -- Mark Twain
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Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me. -- Mark Twain
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More than one cigar at a time is excessive smoking. -- Mark Twain
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To succeed in the other trades, capacity must be shown; in the law, concealment of it will do. -- Mark Twain
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I don't see any use in finding out things and clogging up my head with them when I mayn't ever have any occasion to use 'em. -- Mark Twain
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I do not allow my schooling to interfere with my education -- Mark Twain
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First catch your Boer, then kick him. -- Mark Twain
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Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities. -- Mark Twain
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I can help anyone get anything they want out of life. The only problem is that I can't find anyone who knows what they want. -- Mark Twain
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All told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.
Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, -- Mark Twain
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There isn't a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights. -- Mark Twain
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A soiled baby with a neglected nose cannot be conscientiously regarded as a thing of beauty. -- Mark Twain
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Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate. -- Mark Twain
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It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead. -- Mark Twain
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All gods are better than their reputation. -- Mark Twain
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Some things you can't find out; but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing: no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out. -- Mark Twain
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The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work. - Mark Twain -- Mark Twain
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One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge. -- Mark Twain
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The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another. -- Mark Twain
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Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. -- Mark Twain
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The mania for giving the Government power to meddle with the private affairs of cities or citizens is likely to cause endless trouble. -- Mark Twain
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I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent. -- Mark Twain
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Circumstance - which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final and must be obeyed by all - and will be -- Mark Twain
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Now he found out a new thing
namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing. -- Mark Twain
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The human being places sexual intercourse above all other joys, but leaves it out of his heaven. -- Mark Twain
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It was the most earnest ambition I ever had ... Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job. -- Mark Twain
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It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them. -- Mark Twain
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For the majority of us, the past is a regret, the future an experiment -- Mark Twain
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If a person offends you, and you are in doubt as to whether it was intentional or not, do not resort to extreme measures; simply watch your chance, and hit him with a brick. -- Mark Twain
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The world has corrected the Bible. The church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession-and take the credit of the correction. -- Mark Twain
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Git up and hump yourself, Jim! There ain't a minute to lose. They're after us! -- Mark Twain
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When whole races and peoples conspire to propagate gigantic mute lies in the interest of tyrannies and shams, why should we care anything about the trifling lies told by individuals? -- Mark Twain
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The Public is merely a multiplied 'me.' -- Mark Twain
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The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life. -- Mark Twain
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It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions. -- Mark Twain
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The xmas holidays have this high value: that they remind Forgetters of the Forgotten, & repair damaged relationships. -- Mark Twain
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We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess. -- Mark Twain
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I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure. -- Mark Twain
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Total abstinence is so excellent a thing that it cannot be carried to too great an extent. In my passion for it I even carry it so far as to totally abstain from total abstinence itself. -- Mark Twain
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There is no such thing as material covetousness. All covetousness is spiritual ... Any so-called material thing that you want is merely a symbol: you want it not for itself, but because it will content your spirit for the moment. -- Mark Twain
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I couldn't bear to think about it; and yet, somehow, I couldn't think about nothing else. -- Mark Twain
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The house was as empty as a beer closet in premises where painters have been at work. -- Mark Twain
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The 'Memphis Avalanche' reports that the Professor's course met with pretty general approval in the community; knowing that the law was powerless, in the actual condition of public sentiment, to protect him, he protected himself. -- Mark Twain
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Let us not be too particular. It is better to have old second-hand diamonds than none at all. -- Mark Twain
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There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle afer cycle, by force and bloodshed. -- Mark Twain
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Switzerland would me a mighty big place if it were ironed flat. -- Mark Twain
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Really, what we want now, is not laws against crime, but a law against insanity. That is where the true evil lies. -- Mark Twain
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Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the state die? Oh, no. -- Mark Twain
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I had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from the false point - mark twain - raised the second reef abreast the big snag in the bend, and had quarter less twain. -- Mark Twain
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I don't want my girl to be so skinny she can knife me with her knee. -- Mark Twain
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How charmed I am when I overhear a German word which I understand! -- Mark Twain
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Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society. -- Mark Twain
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The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it. -- Mark Twain
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Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; -- Mark Twain
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Whatever a man's age, he can reduce it several years by putting a bright-colored flower in his button-hole. -- Mark Twain
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The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think. -- Mark Twain
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When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it; any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence. -- Mark Twain
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A man's first duty is to his own conscience and honor; the party and country come second to that, and never first. -- Mark Twain
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For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness. -- Mark Twain
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Wish you were with the cannibals and it was dinner-time. -- Mark Twain
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Heroine: girl who is perfectly charming to live with, in a book. -- Mark Twain
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The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not. -- Mark Twain
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To forget pain is to be painless; to forget care is to be rid of it; to go abroad is to accomplish both. -- Mark Twain
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Fleas can be taught nearly anything a congressman can. -- Mark Twain
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Why shouldn't we be honest and honorable, and lie every time we get a chance? That is to say, why shouldn't we be consistent, and either lie all the time or not at all? -- Mark Twain
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The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example. It is still clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental. -- Mark Twain
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The true charm of pedestrians does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. -- Mark Twain
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Do your duty today and repent tomorrow. -- Mark Twain
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If the writer doesn't sweat, the reader will. -- Mark Twain
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Whatever you say, say it with conviction -- Mark Twain
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And now we get realized to us once more another thing which we often forget - or try to: that no man has a wholly undiseased mind; that in one way or another all men are mad. -- Mark Twain
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Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man. -- Mark Twain
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When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know. -- Mark Twain
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It had borne the burden, it had earned the honor - -- Mark Twain
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Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. -- Mark Twain
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Tom counted the pages of the sermon; after church he always knew how many pages there had been, but he seldom knew anything else about the discourse. -- Mark Twain
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Maturity ... is fatal to so many enchantments. -- Mark Twain
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A man has no business to be depressed by a disappointment, anyway; he ought to make up his mind to get even. -- Mark Twain
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You have heretofore found out, by my teachings, that man is a fool; you are now aware that woman is a damned fool. -- Mark Twain
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Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech. -- Mark Twain
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Wit is the sudden marriage of ideas which before their union were not perceived to have any relation. -- Mark Twain
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Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper. -- Mark Twain
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Focus more on your desire than on your doubt, and the dream will take care of itself. -- Mark Twain
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If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed. -- Mark Twain
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Honest poverty is a gem that even a king might be proud to call his own - but I wish to sell out -- Mark Twain
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The only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible. -- Mark Twain
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If all the fools in this world should die, lordly God how lonely I should be. -- Mark Twain
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Those who don't read good books have no advantage over those who can't. -- Mark Twain
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That is a society editor, sitting there elegantly dressed, with his legs crossed in that indolent way, observing the clothes the ladies wear, so that he can describe them for his paper and make them out finer than they are and get bribes for it and become wealthy. -- Mark Twain
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We always prized him, but never so much as now, when we are going to lose him. -- Mark Twain
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you are going to find out the facts of a thing, what's the sense in guessing out what ain't the facts and wasting ammunition? -- Mark Twain
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I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people. -- Mark Twain
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When the human race has once acquired a superstition, nothing short of death is ever likely to remove it. -- Mark Twain
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Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty. -- Mark Twain
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I do not like work even when someone else is doing it. -- Mark Twain
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There are lies, damned lies and statistics. -- Mark Twain
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The slowness of one section of the world about adopting the valuable ideas of another section of it is a curious thing and unaccountable. -- Mark Twain
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The secret to getting ahead is getting started. -- Mark Twain
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Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had to learn more than any one man ought to learn; and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours. -- Mark Twain
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We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain. -- Mark Twain
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B Y AND BY, WHEN WE GOT UP, WE TURNED OVER THE TRUCK THE GANG had stole off of the wreck, and found boots, and blankets, and clothes, and all sorts of other things, and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and three boxes of seegars. -- Mark Twain
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I am dead to adverbs; they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference; it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them. -- Mark Twain
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Sane and intelligent human beings are like all other human beings, and carefully and cautiously and diligently conceal their private real opinions from the world and give out fictitious ones in their stead for general consumption. -- Mark Twain
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A conspiracy is nothing but a secret agreement of a number of men for the pursuance of policies which they dare not admit in public -- Mark Twain
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To eat is human, to digest, divine -- Mark Twain
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Because if he was sick he would pull his clothes off SOME time or other - don't you reckon he would? -- Mark Twain
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Your country and mine is an interesting one, but there is nothing there that is half so interesting as the human mind. -- Mark Twain
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I have no special regard for Satan; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him. It may even be that I lean a little his way, on account of his not having a fair show. All religions issue bibles against him, and say the most injurious things about him, but we never hear his side. -- Mark Twain
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I do not like an injurious lie, except when it injures somebody else. -- Mark Twain
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I have thought many times since that if poets when they get discouraged would blow their brains out, they could write very much better when they got well. -- Mark Twain
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No man is straitly honest to any but himself and God. -- Mark Twain
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If you have no will to change it, you have no right to criticize it. -- Mark Twain
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When the world is made to be idiot-proof, the world will become overpopulated with idiots. -- Mark Twain
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The difference between those that succeed and those that fail is, those that succeeded tried. -- Mark Twain
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When did the r disappear from Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed from the North, nor inherited from England. -- Mark Twain
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For I never care to do a thing in a quiet way; it's got to be theatrical or I don't take any interest in it. -- Mark Twain
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The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling;the comic and the witty story upon the matter. -- Mark Twain
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I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion. -- Mark Twain
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What dost thou know of suffering and oppression! I and my people know, but not thou. -- Mark Twain
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The best and most telling speech is not the actual impromptu one but the counterfeit of it. -- Mark Twain
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When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet deep down in his private heart no man much respects himself. -- Mark Twain
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Age enlarges and enriches the powers of some musical instruments - notably those of the violin - but it seems to set a piano's teeth on edge. -- Mark Twain
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As one boy said, 'I was thinking all these horrible thoughts about my parents when suddenly it hit me-if they're all that bad, how come I'm so wonderful' -- Mark Twain
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There are no standards of taste in wine ... Each man's own taste is the standard, and a majority vote cannot decide for him or in any slightest degree affect the supremacy of his own standard. -- Mark Twain
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In all my travels the thing that has impressed me the most is the universal brotherhood of man-what there is of it. -- Mark Twain
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One of the first achievements of the legislature was to institute a ten-thousand-dollar agricultural fair to show off forty dollars' worth of pumpkins in - however, the Territorial legislature was usually spoken of as the "asylum". -- Mark Twain
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This explains why, whenever a person says sie to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger. -- Mark Twain
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The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right. -- Mark Twain
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Everything has its limit - iron ore cannot be educated into gold. -- Mark Twain
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The gods offer no rewards for intellect. There was never one yet that showed any interest in it ... -- Mark Twain
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Where prejudice exists it always discolors our thoughts. -- Mark Twain
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Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
per
G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE -- Mark Twain
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Modesty antedates clothes and will be resumed when clothes are no more. -- Mark Twain
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As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep and never to refrain when awake. -- Mark Twain
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Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him. So he played with him every time he got a chance. Huckleberry -- Mark Twain
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Good fathers not only tell us how to live, they show us. -- Mark Twain
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Be good and you will be lonely. -- Mark Twain
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If voting made any difference they wouldn't let us do it. -- Mark Twain
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Shall I be car-ri-ed toe the skies, on flow'ry beds of ease, Whilst others fight to win the prize, and sail thro' blood-y seas? He -- Mark Twain
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They did not know that the quicker a fresh-water fish is on the fire after he is caught the better he is; -- Mark Twain
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A man never reaches that dizzy height of wisdom when he can no longer be led by the nose. -- Mark Twain
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Concerning the difference between man and the jackass: some observers hold that there isn't any. But this wrongs the jackass. -- Mark Twain
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To gnaw on is human, towards digest, divine. -- Mark Twain
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No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave. -- Mark Twain
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Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden. -- Mark Twain
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When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing training can't cannot do. Nothing is above its reach. -- Mark Twain
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We were perfectly willing to go in there and rest, but it could not be done. It was only another delusion - a painting by some ingenious artist with little charity in his heart for tired folk. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought. -- Mark Twain
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Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow. -- Mark Twain
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So then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people. -- Mark Twain
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Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave. -- Mark Twain
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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
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I never let school get in the way of my education! -- Mark Twain
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But hunger is pride's master... -- Mark Twain
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The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopt. -- Mark Twain
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He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie. -- Mark Twain
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I am only human, although I regret it. -- Mark Twain
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This dreadful matter brought from these downtrodden people no outburst of rage against these oppressors. They had been heritors and subjects of cruelty and outrage so long that nothing could have startled them but a kindness. -- Mark Twain
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The ordinary chestnut can beget a sickly and reluctant laugh, but it takes a horse chestnut to fetch the gorgeous big horse-laugh. -- Mark Twain
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Credit, that rare bird of security and peace, rested with none, but stood with upraised wings, ready to fly off at the first rumor of suspicion. -- Mark Twain
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Cave is a good word ... The memory of a cave I used to know was always in my mind, with its lofty passages, its silence and solitude, its shrouding gloom, its sepulchral echoes, its fleeting lights, and more than all, its sudden revelations ... -- Mark Twain
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it warn't no time to be sentimentering. -- Mark Twain
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There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather ... In the spring I have counted one hundred and twenty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours. -- Mark Twain
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What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light. -- Mark Twain
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Never let formal education get in the way of your learning. -- Mark Twain
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What do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you think there is a human mind. -- Mark Twain
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Frankness is a jewel; only the young can afford it. -- Mark Twain
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When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them
then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are far apart. -- Mark Twain
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She clung to him, she poured out her terrors, her unavailing regrets, and the far echoes turned them all to jeering laughter. -- Mark Twain
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You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths (orthodoxy) to destroy it. -- Mark Twain
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It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing - I used to be a good boy. -- Mark Twain
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Honesty is the best policy - when there is money in it. -- Mark Twain
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There are people who think that honesty is always the best policy. This is a superstition; there are times when the appearance of it is worth six of it. -- Mark Twain
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Simplified spelling is all right, but, like chastity, you can carry it too far. -- Mark Twain
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Let us save the tomorrows for work. -- Mark Twain
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Every man is born to one possession which out values all his others - his last breath. -- Mark Twain
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We Americans ... bear the ark of liberties of the world. -- Mark Twain
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It's so damned humiliating. -- Mark Twain
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Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals. -- Mark Twain
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Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough. -- Mark Twain
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A Russian imbues his polite things with a heartiness, both of phrase and expression, that compels belief in their sincerity. -- Mark Twain
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I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55. -- Mark Twain
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I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time is come I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake. -- Mark Twain
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I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little
not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining-rod or a diving-bell. -- Mark Twain
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I'm so happy I could scalp somebody. (Said after he got married) -- Mark Twain
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The water is clearer than the air, and the air is the air that angels breathe. -- Mark Twain
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This is the only sane clerical the earthquake has exposed to view yet. -- Mark Twain
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I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can't be made to do it in any possible way. -- Mark Twain
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Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you want. -- Mark Twain
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How little a thing can make us happy when we feel that we have earned it. -- Mark Twain
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Congress: America's only true criminal class. -- Mark Twain
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Man will do many things to get himself loved, he will do all things to get himself envied. -- Mark Twain
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The institution of royalty in any form is an insult to the human race. -- Mark Twain
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Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized. -- Mark Twain
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The reason most people don't go to church is because they've already been. -- Mark Twain
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How slow and still the time did drag along. -- Mark Twain
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If you have to swallow a frog, don't stare at it too long. -- Mark Twain
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Congress - that great, benevolent asylum for the helpless -- Mark Twain
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I do see that there is an argument against suicide: the grief of the worshipers left behind, the awful famine in their hearts, these are too costly terms for the release. -- Mark Twain
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Syrian travel has its interesting features, like travel in any other part of the world, and yet to break your leg or have the cholera adds a welcome variety to it. -- Mark Twain
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Ignorance is not not knowin' - Ignorance is knowin' what ain't so. -- Mark Twain
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What God wills, will happen; thou canst not hurry it, thou canst not alter it; therefore wait; and be patient -- Mark Twain
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Optimist: Person who travels on nothing from nowhere to happiness. -- Mark Twain
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Every citizen of the republic ought to consider himself an unofficial policeman, and keep unsalaried watch and ward over the laws and their execution. -- Mark Twain
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The worst thing you can do to a man is to tell him he can have what he wants. -- Mark Twain
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Wilson stopped and stood silent. Inattention dies a quick and sure death when a speaker does that. -- Mark Twain
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Modesty died when clothes were born. -- Mark Twain
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The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be damned. -- Mark Twain
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The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the fellow who can't read a line. -- Mark Twain
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Comedy keeps the heart sweet. -- Mark Twain
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I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't know why. -- Mark Twain
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It was not lively enough for a pleasure trip; but if we had only had a corpse it would have made a noble funeral excursion. -- Mark Twain
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Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners. -- Mark Twain
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I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them have never happened. -- Mark Twain
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God pours out love upon all with a lavish hand
but He reserves vengeance for His very own. -- Mark Twain
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Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts or happenings. It consist mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever flowing through one's head. -- Mark Twain
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The more I know about people, the better I like my dogs. -- Mark Twain
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The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities. -- Mark Twain
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If you take epitaphs seriously, we ought to bury the living and resurrect the dead. -- Mark Twain
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To be great, truly great, you have to be the kind of person who makes the others around you great. -- Mark Twain
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The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog. -- Mark Twain
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There are no witches. The witch text remains; only the practice has changed. Hell fire is gone, but the text remains. Infant damnation is gone, but the text remains. More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the texts that authorized them remain. -- Mark Twain
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Patriotism is merely a religion-love of country, worship of country, devotion to the country's flag and honor and welfare. -- Mark Twain
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The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. [On Lohengrin] -- Mark Twain
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No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot -- Mark Twain
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Here they come, a tilting! Five hundred mailed and belted knights on bicycles! -- Mark Twain
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The thing for us to do is just to do our duty, and not worry about whether anybody sees us do it or not. -- Mark Twain
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The real yellow peril: Gold. -- Mark Twain
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To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long life; -- Mark Twain
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The first time the Deity came down to earth, he brought life and death; when he came the second time, he brought hell. -- Mark Twain
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The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. -- Mark Twain
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Oh Death where is thy sting! It has none. But life has. -- Mark Twain
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The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity. -- Mark Twain
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Most of the things I worried about in life never happened. -- Mark Twain
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Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection-that is the last and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement. -- Mark Twain
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In the South the war is what A.D. is elsewhere; they date from it. -- Mark Twain
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There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that. -- Mark Twain
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Armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it. -- Mark Twain
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Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer we'd all have frozen to death! -- Mark Twain
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I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. -- Mark Twain
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No ship can out sail death -- Mark Twain
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To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings. I am no longer of ye-what ye say of me is now of no consequence. -- Mark Twain
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The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated. -- Mark Twain
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The higher animals get their teeth without pain or inconvenience. Man gets his through months and months of cruel torture; he will never get a set which can really be depended on 'till a dentist makes him one. -- Mark Twain
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However, I assured her that if he found he couldn't stand it I would fix him so that he could. -- Mark Twain
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We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us. -- Mark Twain
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Presently it occurred to him that he wished he was sick; then he could stay home from school. -- Mark Twain
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One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one. -- Mark Twain
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The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. 'tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. -- Mark Twain
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One learns people through the heart, not through the eyes or the intellect. -- Mark Twain
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A home without a cat - and a well-fed, well-petted and properly revered cat - may be a perfect home, perhaps, but how can it prove title? -- Mark Twain
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It consists mainly of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one's head. -- Mark Twain
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I've dealt with many crises in my life, but few will ever happen. -- Mark Twain
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Tom found himself writing "BECKY" in the sand with his big toe; he scratched it out, and was angry with himself for his weakness. But he wrote it again, nevertheless; he could not help it. -- Mark Twain
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Eschew surplusage. -- Mark Twain
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I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. -- Mark Twain
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Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting over. -- Mark Twain
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All emotion is involuntary when genuine. -- Mark Twain
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If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning. And If it's your job to eat two frogs, it's best to eat the biggest one first. -- Mark Twain
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The funniest things are the forbidden. -- Mark Twain
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It's an awful snug place for orgies." "What orgies?" "I dono. But robbers always have orgies, and of course we've got to have them, too. -- Mark Twain
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Denial is much more then an Egyptian River. -- Mark Twain
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I'm the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography. -- Mark Twain
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No one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms-fortunately harmless forms as a rule. -- Mark Twain
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Giving up smoking is the easiest thing in the world. I know because I've done it thousands of times. -- Mark Twain
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I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another. -- Mark Twain
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If one is honest there is no need to remember. -- Mark Twain
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Imagine, if you will, that I am an idiot. Then, imagine that I am also a Congressman. But, alas, I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
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Travel is fatal to bigotry. -- Mark Twain
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The man who is ostentatious of his modesty is twin to the statue that wears a fig-leaf. -- Mark Twain
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That is the way we are made: we don't reason, where we feel; we just feel. -- Mark Twain
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Is the human race a joke? Was it devised and patched together in a dull time when there was nothing important to do? -- Mark Twain
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If you don't like the weather in New England now, just wait a few minutes. -- Mark Twain
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A great and priceless thing is a new interest! How it takes possession of a man! how it clings to him, how it rides him! -- Mark Twain
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There is a sort of pathos about it when one remembers how few are your days, how childish your pomps, and what shadows you are! -- Mark Twain
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By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again
and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law. -- Mark Twain
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When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old. -- Mark Twain
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All say, 'how hard it is that we have to die' -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live. -- Mark Twain
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Many foolish persons, wanderers from other parts, have the vain fashion of graving their names and the obscure places whence they come, upon its stones, which is silly and marketh the doer for a fool. -- Mark Twain
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What, sir, would the people of the Earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce. -- Mark Twain
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Work! work! and God will work with us! -- Mark Twain
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When there was room on the ledge outside of the pots and boxes for a cat, the cat was there- in sunny weather- stretched at full length, asleep and blissful, with her furry belly to the sun and a paw curved over her nose. -- Mark Twain
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A wanton waste of projectiles. -- Mark Twain
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A man can't get his rights in a govment like this. Sometimes I've a mighty notion to just leave the country for good and all. -- Mark Twain
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Those who do not read the news are uninformed. Those who do are misinformed. -- Mark Twain
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The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read. -- Mark Twain
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I'm merely running some errands. This is now off the record. -- Mark Twain
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I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts. -- Mark Twain
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There isn't anything so grotesque or so incredible that the average human being can't believe it. -- Mark Twain
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SATAN'S LETTER
This is a strange place, and extraordinary place, and interesting. There is nothing resembling it at home. The people are all insane, the other animals are all insane, the earth is insane, Nature itself is insane. -- Mark Twain
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We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles. -- Mark Twain
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Who is this Renaissance? Where did he come from? Who gave him permission to cram the Republic with his execrable daubs? -- Mark Twain
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There are German songs which can make a stranger to the language cry. -- Mark Twain
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If there are no cigars in heaven, I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
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Take your mind out every now and then and dance on it. It is getting all caked up. -- Mark Twain
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Wine is a clog to the pen, not an inspiration. -- Mark Twain
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Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes. -- Mark Twain
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Temper is what gets most of us into trouble. Pride is what keeps us there. -- Mark Twain
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The problem with education is school. -- Mark Twain
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There is no unhappiness like the misery of sighting land (and work) again after a cheerful, careless voyage. -- Mark Twain
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Therein lies the defect of revenge: it's all in the anticipation; the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure; at least the pain is the biggest end of it. -- Mark Twain
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We all like to see people sea-sick when we are not ourselves. -- Mark Twain
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Virtue has never been as respectable as money. -- Mark Twain
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The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow. -- Mark Twain
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Golf is a good walk spoiled. -- Mark Twain
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A street in Constantinople is a picture which one ought to see once - not oftener. -- Mark Twain
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If we were meant to talk more than listen, we would have two mouths and one ear. -- Mark Twain
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The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. -- Mark Twain
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Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again. -- Mark Twain
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In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. -- Mark Twain
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April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four. -- Mark Twain
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I said there was but one solitary thing about the past worth remembering, and that was the fact that it is past-can't be restored. -- Mark Twain
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How empty is theory in the presence of fact! -- Mark Twain
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Every generalization is dangerous, especially this one. -- Mark Twain
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The solution to our water problems is more rain. -- Mark Twain
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It is a mistake that there is no bath that will cure people's manners, but drowning would help. -- Mark Twain
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A German joke is no laughing matter. -- Mark Twain
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Talent without work is useless, thank God -- Mark Twain
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There are no wild animals until man makes them so. -- Mark Twain
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Make the best o' things the way you find 'em.. -- Mark Twain
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I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna. -- Mark Twain
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I was gratified to be able to answer promptly, and I did. I said I didn't know. -- Mark Twain
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I had nothing to do but listen to the pattering of the fountains and take medicine and throw it up again. It was dangerous recreation, but it was pleasanter than traveling in Syria. -- Mark Twain
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I like criticism, but it must be my way. -- Mark Twain
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Write without pay until someone offers pay. If nobody offers within three years, the candidate may look upon this as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for. -- Mark Twain
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Not all the Greek runners in the original Olympics were totally naked. Some wore shoes. -- Mark Twain
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A well put together unreality is pretty hard to beat. -- Mark Twain
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Tea is an affront to lunch and an insult to dinner. -- Mark Twain
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Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals. -- Mark Twain
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A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs. -- Mark Twain
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Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference. -- Mark Twain
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Did you think you had educated the superstition out of those people?'
'I certainly did think it.'
'Well, then, you may unthink it. -- Mark Twain
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America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home. -- Mark Twain
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The bane of Americans is overwork-and the ruin of any work is a divided interest. Concentrate-concentrate. One thing at a time. -- Mark Twain
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Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries. -- Mark Twain
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The Welshman allowed it to eat into the vitals of his visitors, -- Mark Twain
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Demagogue
a vessel containing beer and other liquids. -- Mark Twain
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Just when I thought I was learning how to live, 'twas then I realized I was learning how to die. -- Mark Twain
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A devil will come, or maybe two or three, but you can't see 'em, you can only hear something like the wind, or maybe hear 'em talk; and when they're -- Mark Twain
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I am pushing sixty. That is enough exercise for me. -- Mark Twain
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Be virtuous and you will be eccentric. -- Mark Twain
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How unfortunate and how narrowing a thing it is for a man to have wealth who makes a god of it instead of a servant -- Mark Twain
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I was born modest; not all over, but in spots. -- Mark Twain
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The Bible is a wonderful book; you can prove anything you want with it. -- Mark Twain
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I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can. -- Mark Twain
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A man is accepted into a church for what he believes and he is turned out for what he knows. -- Mark Twain
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Do not complain about growing old. It is a privilege denied to many. -- Mark Twain
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If there is no smoking in heaven, I'm not interested -- Mark Twain
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Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar. -- Mark Twain
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You can go to heaven if you want. I'd rather stay in Bermuda. -- Mark Twain
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Write without pay until somebody offers to pay. -- Mark Twain
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More men go to church than want to. -- Mark Twain
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If you send a damned fool to St. Louis, and you don't tell them he's a damned fool, they'll never find out. -- Mark Twain
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By "trampling upon the helpless abroad" with unchecked surveillance, Americans have learned, "by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home." -- Mark Twain
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A person who won't read books has no advantage over one who can't read books. -- Mark Twain
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Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene -- Mark Twain
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The less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it -- Mark Twain
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We laugh and laugh. Then cry and cry- Then feebler laugh, Then die. -- Mark Twain
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Honesty: The best of all the lost arts. -- Mark Twain
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There isn't anything you can't stand if you are only born and bred to it. -- Mark Twain
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If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be - a Christian. -- Mark Twain
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Some of us cannot be optimists, but all of us can be bigamists -- Mark Twain
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He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. -- Mark Twain
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Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat. -- Mark Twain
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All right, then, I'll go to hell. -- Mark Twain
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I would take up wickedness -- Mark Twain
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The citizen who sees his society's democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor. -- Mark Twain
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When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people. -- Mark Twain
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Use the right word, not its second cousin. -- Mark Twain
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Against a diseased imagination demonstration goes for nothing. -- Mark Twain
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There isn't any way to libel the human race. -- Mark Twain
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There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work. -- Mark Twain
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One is often surprised at the juvenilities which grown people indulge in at sea, and the interest they take in them, and the consuming enjoyment they get out of them. -- Mark Twain
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The political and commercial morals of the United States are not merely food for laughter, they are an entire banquet. -- Mark Twain
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He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients - no, three, I think - yes, it was three; I attended their funerals. -- Mark Twain
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I can speak French but I cannot understand it. -- Mark Twain
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Troubles are only mental; it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them. -- Mark Twain
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Satan had been making admiring remarks about certain of the Creator's sparkling industries
remarks which, being read between the lines, were sarcasms. -- Mark Twain
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Our lives, our liberty, and our property are never in greater danger than when Congress is in session. -- Mark Twain
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Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it? -- Mark Twain
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And she took snuff, too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself. Her -- Mark Twain
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Education is what you must acquire without any interference from your schooling. -- Mark Twain
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I'm a very old man.
I've had lots of problems.
Most of them never happened..! -- Mark Twain
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The poor morsel of food only whetted desire. -- Mark Twain
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It's as mild as goose-milk. -- Mark Twain
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If to be interesting is to be uncommonplace, it is becoming a question, with me, if there are any commonplace people -- Mark Twain
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But we are all insane, anyway. Note the mountain-climbers. -- Mark Twain
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The wit knows that his place is at the tail of a procession. -- Mark Twain
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I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter. -- Mark Twain
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A pessimist is a well-informed optimist. -- Mark Twain
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What a man sees in the human race is merely himself in the deep and honest privacy of his own heart. Byron despised the race because he despised himself. I feel as Byron did, and for the same reason. -- Mark Twain
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Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool. -- Mark Twain
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When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend. -- Mark Twain
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A Patriot is someone who stands for his country always, and for his government when it is deserved. -- Mark Twain
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Oh, go to bed!" Dan said that, and went away.
"Oh, yes, it's all very well to say go to bed when a man makes an argument which another man can't answer. -- Mark Twain
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When angry, count to a hundred. -- Mark Twain
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Heaven is the very last place to come to rest and don't you be afraid to bet on that! -- Mark Twain
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Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse-laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings and shriekings and suffocatings. -- Mark Twain
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Better a broken promise than none at all. -- Mark Twain
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The person who has no opinion will seldom be wrong. -- Mark Twain
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Nothing incites to money-crimes like great poverty or great wealth.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927 -- Mark Twain
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I have attended operas, whenever I could not help it, for fourteen years now; I am sure I know of no agony comparable to the listening to an unfamiliar opera. -- Mark Twain
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To do right is wonderful. To teach others to do right is even more wonderful
and much easier. -- Mark Twain
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Nobody could infer the master-mind in the top of that edifice from the edifice itself. -- Mark Twain
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Some people bring joy wherever they go, and some people bring joy whenever they go. -- Mark Twain
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I will gradually drop this subject of graveyards. I have been trying all I could to get down to the sentimental part of it, but I cannot accomplish it. I think there is no genuinely sentimental part to it. It is all grotesque, ghastly, horrible. -- Mark Twain
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Adam was the author of sin, and I wish he had taken out an international copyright on it. -- Mark Twain
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It is easy to see that the inventor of the heaven did not originate the idea, but copied it from the show-ceremonies of some sorry little sovereign State up in the back settlements of the Orient somewhere. -- Mark Twain
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The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say. -- Mark Twain
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I do not know what we should do without the pulpit. We could better spare the sun-the moon, anyway. -- Mark Twain
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A thing long expected takes the form of the unexpected when at last it comes. -- Mark Twain
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Germany, the diseased world's bathhouse. -- Mark Twain
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If you do read the newspaper you are misinformed. -- Mark Twain
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Man proposes, but God blocks the game. -- Mark Twain
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Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business. -- Mark Twain
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People who do not read have no advantage over those who can not read. -- Mark Twain
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One gains at least two to three times more experience grabbing the tiger by the tail than reading about it in a book. -- Mark Twain
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Never waste a lie; you never know when you may need it. -- Mark Twain
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The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives. -- Mark Twain
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A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows, and is just about as inspiring. -- Mark Twain
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I cannot help but notice that there is no problem between us that cannot be solved by your departure. -- Mark Twain
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Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him. -- Mark Twain
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Dan said the other day to the guide, Enough, enough, enough! Say no more! Lump the whole thing! say that the Creator made Italy from designs by Michael Angelo! -- Mark Twain
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The human race has only one really effective weapon and that is laughter. -- Mark Twain
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The old saw says, 'Let a sleeping dog lie.' Right. Still, when there is much at stake it is better to get a newspaper to do it. -- Mark Twain
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The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it. -- Mark Twain
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If you have nothing to say, say nothing. -- Mark Twain
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Canadian girls are so pretty it's a relief now and then to see a plain one. -- Mark Twain
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It is never wrong to do the right thing. -- Mark Twain
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Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest. -- Mark Twain
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A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime. -- Mark Twain
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The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. -- Mark Twain
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George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie. -- Mark Twain
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Almost every convert runs the risk of catching our civilization ... I compassionate missionary, leave China! come home and convert these Christians! -- Mark Twain
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They did not know it was impossible so they did it -- Mark Twain
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We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments. -- Mark Twain
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There's always a hole in theories somewhere if you look close enough. -- Mark Twain
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Every man is a moon; he has a side no one sees. -- Mark Twain
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Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known and I know the rest. -- Mark Twain
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Do not tell fish stories where the people know you; but particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish. -- Mark Twain
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When you catch an adjective, kill it - perhaps the best possible advice for budding writers. -- Mark Twain
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Principles aren't of much account anyway, except at election time. After that you hang them up to let them season. -- Mark Twain
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Every inventor is a crackpot until his idea succeeds. -- Mark Twain
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A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds. -- Mark Twain
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The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in heaven. -- Mark Twain
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Humor is like a frog; if you dissect it, it dies. -- Mark Twain
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Go and surprise the whole country by doing something right. -- Mark Twain
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It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it. -- Mark Twain
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Oh - go on, I'll take a breath or two - I don't know where I am, I'm all at sea. He -- Mark Twain
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The ability to find solutions to life's challenges is what makes us grow as a person. -- Mark Twain
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I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it. -- Mark Twain
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An uneasy conscience is a hair in the mouth. -- Mark Twain
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Optimist: day dreamer more elegantly spelled. -- Mark Twain
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I don't know. I don't want to sell him." "All right. It's a mighty small tick, anyway. -- Mark Twain
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Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it. -- Mark Twain
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It's the little things that smoothes people's roads the most -- Mark Twain
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Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on. -- Mark Twain
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We are all ignorant; just about different things. -- Mark Twain
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You can't reason someone out of something that they weren't reasoned into in the first place. -- Mark Twain
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When ever I get the urge to write, I lie down and it usually passes. -- Mark Twain
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Buy land, they're not making it anymore. -- Mark Twain
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But they (the infantry) had no use for boys of twelve and thirteen, and before I had a chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away. -- Mark Twain
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I'm all for prosperity. It's change I object to. -- Mark Twain
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Majority Patriotism is the customary Patriotism. -- Mark Twain
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In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that. -- Mark Twain
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Their very imagination was dead. When you can say that of a man he has struck bottom ... there is no lower deep for him. -- Mark Twain
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Cherimoya, the most delicious fruit known to men. -- Mark Twain
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Medicine has made all its progress during the past fifty years ... How many operations that are now in use were known fifty years ago?-they were not operations, they were executions. -- Mark Twain
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Sometimes people do get hurt -- Mark Twain
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In my experience, previously counted chickens never do hatch. -- Mark Twain
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That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don't know nothing about it. -- Mark Twain
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To one in sympathy with nature, each season, in its turn, seems the loveliest. -- Mark Twain
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Tis Better to Sit there and LOOK the fool, than to open your mouth and prove it. -- Mark Twain
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Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with. -- Mark Twain
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Never learn to do anything: if you don't learn, you'll always find someone else to do it for you. -- Mark Twain
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All scenery in California requires distance to give it its highest charm. -- Mark Twain
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Balloon: Thing to take meteroric observations and commit suicide with. -- Mark Twain
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There is nothing that saps one's confidence as the knowing how to do a thing -- Mark Twain
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The English alphabet is pure insanity ... , It can hardly spell any word in the language with any degree of certainty. -- Mark Twain
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One lives to find out. -- Mark Twain
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Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy. -- Mark Twain
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For a male person bric-a-brac hunting is about as robust a business as making doll-clothes. -- Mark Twain
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Golden rule: Made of hard metal so it could stand severe wear, it not being known at that time that butter would answer. -- Mark Twain
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Isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so. -- Mark Twain
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I am as prompt as a clock, if I only know the day a thing is wanted-otherwise I am a natural procrastinaturalist. -- Mark Twain
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Some of the worst things in my life never even happened. -- Mark Twain
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Water, taken in moderation, cannot hurt anybody. -- Mark Twain
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I could be an idiot, or I can serve in Congress, but I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
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Choosing not to read is like closing an open door to paradise -- Mark Twain
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Such is the human race. Often it seems such a pity that Noah.. didn't miss the boat. -- Mark Twain
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Human pride is not worthwhile; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it. -- Mark Twain
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Two things which are the peculiar domain of the heart, not the mind - politics and religion. He doesn't want to know the other side. He wants arguments and statistics for his own side, and nothing more. -- Mark Twain
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There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one - keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy. -- Mark Twain
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Life is planned with one principle objective to make you do all the particular things you particularly don't want to do. -- Mark Twain
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Always acknowledge a fault. This will throw those in authority off their guard and give you an opportunity to commit more. -- Mark Twain
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Going to law is losing a cow for the sake of a cat. -- Mark Twain
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Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it. -- Mark Twain
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We ain't dead
we are only off being pirates. -- Mark Twain
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He liked to like people, therefore people liked him. -- Mark Twain
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She never used large words, but she had a natural gift for making small ones do effective work. -- Mark Twain
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Benefit of clergy: Half-rate on the railroad. -- Mark Twain
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There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded. -- Mark Twain
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Ignorance is not, not knowing something. It is knowing what isn't so. -- Mark Twain
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Human nature appears to be just the same, all over the world -- Mark Twain
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To cease smoking is the easiest thing I ever did. I ought to know because I've done it a thousand times. -- Mark Twain
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Surely the ass who invented the first religion ought to be the first ass damned -- Mark Twain
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The Moral Sense teaches us what is right, and how to avoid it-when unpopular. -- Mark Twain
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I am not an economist. I am an honest man! -- Mark Twain
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When angry, count four. When very angry, swear. -- Mark Twain
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gone, you see, yet finding -- Mark Twain
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To be vested with enormous authority is a fine thing; but to have the <>ong>onong>-looking world c<>ong>onong>sent to it is finer. -- Mark Twain
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I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it. -- Mark Twain