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We are strange beings, we seem to go free, but we go in chains - chains of training, custom, convention, association, environment - in a word, Circumstance, and against these bonds the strongest of us struggle in vain.

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
Seems
Beings
Circumstance
Circumstances
Conventions
Seem
Association
Strange
Customs
Environment
Strongest
Struggle
Chains
Bonds
Word
Vain
Convention
Free
Training
Custom

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I am dead to adverbs they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them.
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All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.
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It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.
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When one has tasted watermelon he knows what the angels eat.
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Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress but I repeat myself.
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Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
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Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.
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For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness.
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We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it - and stop there.
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To be, or not to be that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life.
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We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.
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One must travel, to learn. Every day, now, old Scriptural phrases that never possessed any significance for me before, take to themselves a meaning.
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from the beginning of my sojourn in this world there was a persistent vacancy in me where the industry ought to be. (Ought to was is better, perhaps, though the most of the authorities differ as to this.
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The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter.
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I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.
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Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination?
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I have been born more times than anybody except Krishna.
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Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW is only a small step and quickly taken.
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