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Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man. The biography of the man himself cannot be written.

Mark Twain

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Mark Twain
Age: 74 †
Born: 1835
Born: November 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 21
Aphorist
Author
Autobiographer
Humorist
Journalist
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Prosaist
Science Fiction Writer
Teacher
Florida
Missouri
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel L. Clemens
Samuel Clemens
Buttons
Clothes
Fashion
Inspiration
Written
Cannot
Biographers
Men
Biography
Biographies

More quotes by Mark Twain

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It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.
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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.
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Well, Ben Rogers, if I was as ignorant as you I wouldn't let on.
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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!
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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.
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I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it.
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Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
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If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
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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.
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There is a great difference between feeding parties to wild beasts and stirring up their finer feelings in an inquisition. One is the system of degraded barbarians, the other of enlightened civilized people.
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He had only one vanity he thought he could give advice better than any other person.
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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.
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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.
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Every year you wait, long ago gets farther away.
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A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
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If you take epitaphs seriously, we ought to bury the living and resurrect the dead.
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Talking of patriotism, what humbug it is it is a word which always commemorates a robbery.
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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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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.
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A marriage. . .will give a new gladness to the sunshine, a new fragrance to the flowers, a new beauty to the earth, and a new mystery to life.
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