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Jane Austen's books, too, are absent from this library. Just that one omission alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

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
Books
Jane
Art
Absent
Book
Fairly
Make
Hadn
Good
Beer
Would
Library
Drink
Omission
Alone
Austen

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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?
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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.
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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.
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The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.
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The average woman would rather have beauty than brains, because the average man can see better than he can think.
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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.
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I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
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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.
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A better idea than my own is to listen.
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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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The laws of Nature take precedence of all human laws. The purpose of all human laws is one - to defeat the laws of Nature. This is the case among all the nations, both civilized and savage. It is a grotesquerie, but when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.
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No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.
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Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.
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Children have but little charity for one another's defects
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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?
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Genius has no youth, but starts with the ripeness of age and old experience.
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I have always been rather better treated in San Francisco than I actually deserved.
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Human beings are the only creatures who blush - or who need to.
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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.
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Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.
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