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

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I knew a man who grabbed a cat by the tail and learned forty percent more about cats than the man who didn't.
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They all laid their heads together like as many lawyers when they are gettin' ready to prove that a man's heirs ain't got any right to his property.
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If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian.
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Happiness ain't a thing in itself -it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant. And so, as soon as the novelty is over and the force of the contrast dulled, it ain't happiness any longer, and you have to get something fresh.
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He charged nothing for his preaching and it was worth it too.
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To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
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When politics enter into municipal government, nothing resulting therefrom in the way of crimes and infamies is then incredible. It actually enables one to accept and believe the impossible.
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I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't know why.
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The fact is, the king was a good deal more than a king, he was a man and when a man is a man, you can't knock it out of him.
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God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage
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Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.
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I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.
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It used to be a good hotel, but that proves nothing - I used to be a good boy.
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It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
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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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It is a pity we can't escape from life when we are young.
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France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.
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Eternal rest sounds comforting in the pulpit well, you try it once, and see how heavy time will hang on your hands.
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I have never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting.
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What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing he knew nobody had said it before.
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