Quote

Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.

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
Thing
Way
Make
World
Surest
Namely
Promise
Found
Body

More quotes by Mark Twain

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I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.
Mark Twain
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You can't throw too much style into a miracle.
Mark Twain
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I had longed to be a butterfly, and I was one at last. I attended private parties in sumptuous evening dress, simpered and aired my graces like a born beau, and polkaed and schoisched with a step peculiar to myself - and the kangaroo.
Mark Twain
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Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first! Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
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Newport, Rhode Island, that breeding place-that stud farm, so to speak-of aristocracy aristocracy of the American type.
Mark Twain
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Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.
Mark Twain
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Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
Mark Twain
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No throne exists that has a right to exist, and no symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear any device but the skull and crossbones of that kindred industry which differs from royalty only businesswise-merely as retail differs from wholesale.
Mark Twain
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Balloon: Thing to take meteroric observations and commit suicide with.
Mark Twain
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You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.
Mark Twain
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I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.
Mark Twain
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Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of [Muslim] rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound.
Mark Twain
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It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.
Mark Twain
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....try the mustard, - a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard.
Mark Twain
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I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.
Mark Twain
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Yes, even I am dishonest. Not in many ways, but in some. Forty-one, I think it is.
Mark Twain
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Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself. She gave that look, and carried it away to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.
Mark Twain
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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.
Mark Twain
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I will remark in the way of general information, that in California, that land of felicitous nomenclature, the literary name of this sort of stuff is hogwash
Mark Twain
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We all like to see people sea-sick when we are not ourselves.
Mark Twain