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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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Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.
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Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink - under any circumstances.
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The average American's simplest and commonest form of breakfast consists of coffee and beefsteak.
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We can secure other people's approval, if we do right and try hard but our own is worth a hundred of it, and no way has been found out of securing that.
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It must be well-nigh a maximum of sense to behave so that one escapes being hanged.
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The heart is the real fountain of youth.
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Troubles are only mental it is the mind that manufactures them, and the mind can gorge them, banish them, abolish them.
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Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
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Man is a marvelous curiosity...he thinks he is the Creator's pet...he even believes the Creator loves him has passion for him sits up nights to admire him yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks he listens. Isn't it a quaint idea.
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it is not wise to keep the fire going under a slander unless you can get some large advantage out of keeping it alive. Few slanders can stand the wear of silence.
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I'm pushing 60 years of age...and that's enough exercise for me.
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Every man is in his own person the whole human race without a detail lacking....I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born.
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You know that kind of quiver that trembles around through you when you are seeing something so strange and enchanting and wonderful that it is just a fearful joy to be alive and look at it and you know how you gaze, and your lips turn dry and your breath comes short, but you wouldn't be anywhere but there, not for the world.
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I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.
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But we are all insane, anyway ... The suicides seem to be the only sane people.
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By law of periodical repetition, everything which has happened once must happen again and again -- and not capriciously, but at regular periods, and each thing in its own period, not another's and each obeying its own law.
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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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There is not a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.
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Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
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