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There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.

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
Lives
Sooner
Human
Attempt
Humans
According
Whole
Violent
Sufferer
Things
Later
Measles
Never
Beings
Sufferers
Like
Poetry
Mild
People
Age
Attacks

More quotes by Mark Twain

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Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
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If there is one thing that will make a man peculiarly and insufferable self-conceited, it is to have his stomach behave itself, the first day at sea, when nearly all his comrades are seasick.
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The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.
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Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
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The community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.
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To get the full value of joy You must have someone to divide it with. After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
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The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.
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Every man is a moon and has a side which he turns toward nobody: you have to slip around behind it if you want to see it.
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A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt
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There is nothing in the world like persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus.
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Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.
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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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There was a great difference in boats, of course. For a long time I was on a boat that was so slow we used to forget what year it was we left port in.
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Imagine, if you will, that I am an idiot. Then, imagine that I am also a Congressman. But, alas, I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
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He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed-kind of a syndicate and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that's left over.
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Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore.
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In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.
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I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
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There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.
Mark Twain