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The humorous story is told gravely the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.

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
Even
Story
Dimly
Fact
Teller
Funny
Conceal
Facts
Suspects
Stories
Crafts
Doe
Humorous
Anything
Humor
Best
Told
Gravely

More quotes by Mark Twain

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We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.
Mark Twain
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What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything.
Mark Twain
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It is not what a man knows, but what he thinks of in time.
Mark Twain
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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.
Mark Twain
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Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. To live a fulfilled life, we need to keep creating the what is next, of our lives. Without dreams and goals there is no living, only merely existing, and that is not why we are here.
Mark Twain
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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.
Mark Twain
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Where every man in a state has a vote, brutal laws are impossible.
Mark Twain
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When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained.
Mark Twain
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It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.
Mark Twain
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Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
Mark Twain
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain
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I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Mark Twain
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In the real world, nothing happens at the right place at the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to correct that.
Mark Twain
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Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.
Mark Twain
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A clean desk is a sign of a cluttered desk drawer.
Mark Twain
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I always did hate for anyone to know what my plans or hopes or prospects were—for, if I kept people in ignorance in these matters, no one could be disappointed but myself, if they were not realized.
Mark Twain
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A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.
Mark Twain
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That cat will write her autograph all over your leg if you let her.
Mark Twain
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when we badly want a thing, we go to hunting for good and righteous reasons for it we give it that fine name to comfort our consciences, whereas we privately know we are only hunting for plausible ones.
Mark Twain
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I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.
Mark Twain