Quote

His head was an hour-glass it could stow an idea, but it had to do it a grain at a time, not the whole idea at once.

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
Hour
Head
Hours
Idea
Ideas
Stow
Whole
Grain
Time
Glass
Glasses

More quotes by Mark Twain

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When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable.
Mark Twain
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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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I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
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The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy.
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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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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.
Mark Twain
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I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.
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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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I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Mark Twain
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There is no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from our steeples.
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I like Joan of Arc best of all my books and it is the best I know it perfectly well.
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It is curious and interesting to notice what an attraction a fussy, mincing, nickel-plated word has for you.
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How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and [how] hard it is to undo that work again!
Mark Twain
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
Mark Twain
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How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!
Mark Twain
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She is not refined. She is not unrefined. She keeps a parrot
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I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.
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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It is not what a man knows, but what he thinks of in time.
Mark Twain
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I was born modest not all over, but in spots.
Mark Twain