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The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture....He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher.

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
Humor
Awaken
Week
Scorn
Takes
Preacher
Upon
Humorous
Love
Pity
Imposture
Kindness
Professes
Direct
Untruth
Writer
Pretension

More quotes by Mark Twain

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Therein lies the defect of revenge: it's all in the anticipation the thing itself is a pain, not a pleasure at least the pain is the biggest end of it.
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The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.
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God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.
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It is strange the way the ignorant and inexperienced so often and so undeservedly succeed when the informed and the experienced fail.
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.
Mark Twain
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I find that the further I go back, the better things were, whether they happened or not.
Mark Twain
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Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.
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If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it, provided the cannon is empty.
Mark Twain
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Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.
Mark Twain
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When people do not respect us we are sharply offended yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.
Mark Twain
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One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself
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When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.
Mark Twain
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If we learned to walk and talk the way we learn to read and write, everyone would limp and stutter.
Mark Twain
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Don't dream your life, but live your dream
Mark Twain
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in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Mark Twain
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It isn't safe to sit in judgment upon another person's illusion when you are not on the inside. While you are thinking it is a dream, he may be knowing it is a planet.
Mark Twain
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To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.
Mark Twain
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The idea that a baby doesn't amount to anything! Why, one baby is just a house and a front yard full by itself. One baby can, furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. He is enterprising, irrepressible, brimful of lawless activities.
Mark Twain
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Stars and shadows ain't good to see by.
Mark Twain
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Better a broken promise than none at all.
Mark Twain