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

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In other localities certain places in the streams are much better than others, but at Niagara one place is just as good as another, for the reason that the fish do not bite anywhere.
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To eat is human, to digest, divine
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Some things you can't find out but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing: no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.
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Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection-that is the last and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement.
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A tax is a fine for doing well, a fine is a tax for doing wrong.
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I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.
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When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.
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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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The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done - these are traits of the human race at large.
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Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of the other person.
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George Washington, as a boy, was ignorant of the commonest accomplishments of youth. He could not even lie.
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The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.
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Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange for tastes are made, not born. I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head and say, 'Where's your haggis?' and the Fijan would sigh and say, 'Where's your missionary?'
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Always tell the truth then you don't have to remember anything
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He was a solemn, unsmiling, sanctimonious old iceberg who looked like he was waiting for a vacancy in the Trinity.
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My father was an amazing man. The older I got, the smarter he got.
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I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age in 1977 I shall be 142.
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But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of therest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.
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The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.
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