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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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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
Long
Letter
Time
Wrote
Letters
Short
Instead
Write
Didn
Writing

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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.
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All good things arrive unto them that wait - and don't die in the meantime.
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Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
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Inherited ideas are a curious thing, and interesting to observe and examine.
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Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
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We don't care to eat toadstools that think they are truffles.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
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One compliment can keep me going for a whole month.
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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.
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When some men discharge an obligation, you can hear the report for miles around.
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Children have but little charity for one another's defects
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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.
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To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master.
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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.
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