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Obscurity and a competence—that is the life that is best worth living.

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
Life
Obscurity
Competence
Worth
Existence
Happiness
Living
Best

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There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others.
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But the elastic heart of youth cannot be compressed into one constrained shape long at a time.
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When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.
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In India, 'cold weather' is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy.
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Worrying is paying interest on a debt you might not even owe.
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Intellectual ''work'' is misnamed it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and is its own highest reward.
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Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
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Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.
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Canadian girls are so pretty it's a relief now and then to see a plain one.
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I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
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If you will notice, there is seldom a telegram in a paper which fails to show up one or more members & beneficiaries of our Civilization as promenading with his shirt-tail up & the rest of his regalia in the wash.
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When you ascend the hill of prosperity, may you not meet a friend.
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Stars and shadows ain't good to see by.
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A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.
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It will take mind and memory months and possibly years to gather together the details, and thus learn and know the whole extent of the loss.
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In my experience, previously counted chickens never do hatch.
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A man may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands.
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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.
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Do not undervalue the headache. While it is at its sharpest it seems a bad investment but when relief begins, the unexpired remainder is worth $4 a minute.
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If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter.
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