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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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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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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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When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself.
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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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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It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make as good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.
Mark Twain
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Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that did not exist before.
Mark Twain
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I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning... the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.
Mark Twain
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Formerly, if you killed a man, it was possible that you were insane—but now, if you, having friends and money, kill a man, it is evidence that you are a lunatic.
Mark Twain
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You tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is.
Mark Twain
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The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.
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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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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A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
Mark Twain
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I had another convulsion of pleasure when Yale made me a Doctor of Literature, because I was not competent to doctor anybody's literature but my own.
Mark Twain
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Citing a familiar "American joke":
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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To my mind, Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.
Mark Twain
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Everybody yelled at him, and laughed at him, and sassed him, and he sassed back, and said he'd attend to them and lay them out in their regular turns, but he couldn't wait now, because he'd come to town to kill old Colonel Sherburn, and his motto was, "Meat first, and spoon vittles to top off on."
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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The most permanent lessons in morals are those which come, not of book teaching, but of experience.
Mark Twain
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Scientists have odious manners, except when you prop up their theory; then you can borrow money of them.
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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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.
Mark Twain
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I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome.
Mark Twain
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Mark Twain
Creative Commons
Born:
November 30, 1835
Died:
April 21, 1910
(aged 74)
Bio:
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter often called "The Great American Novel".
Known for:
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)
The Innocents Abroad (1869)
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
Life on the Mississippi (1883)
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