Quote

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

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It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.
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Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.
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I am only human, although I regret it.
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The piano may do for love-sick girls who lace themselves to skeletons, and lunch on chalk, pickles and slate pencils, but give me the banjo.
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All saints can do miracles, but few of them can keep a hotel.
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What is the most rigorous law of our being? Growth. No smallest atom of our moral, mental, or physical structure can stand still a year. It grows - it must grow nothing can prevent it.
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How slow and still the time did drag along.
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To stand still is to fall behind.
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It is my belief that nearly any invented quotation, played with confidence, stands a good chance to deceive.
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I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.
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No one can tell me what is a good cigar--for me. I am the only judge... There are no standards--no real standards. Each man's preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him.
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The older we grow the greater becomes our wonder at how much ignorance one can contain without bursting one's clothes.
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Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.
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I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.
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Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.
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Frankness is a jewel only the young can afford it.
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Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.
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And how moving is the eloquence of the untaught when it is the heart that is speaking!
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I am the entire human race compacted together. I have found that there is no ingredient of the race which I do not possess in either a small way or a large way.
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Human beings are the only creatures who blush - or who need to.
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