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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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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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In grandchildren I am the richest man that lives to-day: for I select my grandchildren, whereas all other grandfathers have to take them as they come, good, bad, and indifferent.
Mark Twain
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He says every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind if you want to see it.
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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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 wanted to damage every man in the place, and every woman—and not in their bodies or in their estate, but in their vanity—the place where feeble and foolish people are most vulnerable. So I disguised myself and came back and studied you. You were easy game. You had an old and lofty reputation for honesty, and naturally you were proud of it — it was your treasure of treasures, the very apple of your eye. As soon as I found out that you carefully and vigilantly kept yourselves and your children out of temptation, I knew how to proceed. Why, you simple creatures, the weakest of all weak things is a virtue which has not been tested in the fire.
Mark Twain
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Give an Irishman lager for a month, and he's a dead man. An Irishman 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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Of all the creatures that were made he [man] is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one — the solitary one — that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices — the most hateful... He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing it to be pain... Also — in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind.
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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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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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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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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It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth.
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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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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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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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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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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The statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.
Mark Twain
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It is agreed, in this country, that if a man can arrange his religion so that it perfectly satisfies his conscience, it is not incumbent on him to care whether the arrangement is satisfactory to anyone else or not.
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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Frankenstein took some flesh and bones and blood and made a man out of them; the man ran away and fell to raping and robbing and murdering everywhere, and Frankenstein was horrified and in despair, and said, I made him, without asking his consent, and it makes me responsible for every crime he commits. I am the criminal, he is innocent.
Mark Twain
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The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them. It is said that leaders are readers. However if they read trashy magazines for the majority of their time and they never run with the information that they glean from resourceful books, then they may as well have not taken any time to read at all. It is easier to stay out than get out.
Mark Twain
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Of the delights of this world man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go any length for it—risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.
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)
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