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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
Happiness
Living
Best
Life
Obscurity
Competence
Worth
Existence

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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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Most people can't bear to sit in church for an hour on Sundays. How are they supposed to live somewhere very similar to it for eternity?
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The frankest and freest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing.
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That optimist of yours is always ready to turn hell's backyard into a play-ground.
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What is Man? Man is a noisome bacillus whom Our Heavenly Father created because he was disappointed in the monkey.
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If we should deal out justice only, in this world, who would escape? No, it is better to be generous, and in the end more profitable, for it gains gratitude for us, and love.
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Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for.
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There ain't anything that is so interesting to look at as a place that a book has talked about.
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A crowded police docket is the surest of all signs that trade is brisk and money plenty.
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If horses knew their strength we should not ride anymore.
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when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are . Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least.
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The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
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Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement.
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In religion and politics, people's belief's and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second hand, and without examination
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The introduction of homeopathy forced the old school doctor to stir around and learn something of a rational nature about his business. You may honestly feel grateful that homeopathy survived the attempts of the allopaths to destroy it.
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A monarch, when good, is entitled to the consideration which we accord to a pirate who keeps Sunday School between crimes when bad, he is entitled to none at all.
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Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
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That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.
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A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain.
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