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At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass

Mark Twain

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Mark Twain
Age: 74 †
Born: 1835
Born: November 30
Died: 1910
Died: April 21
Aphorist
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Autobiographer
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Science Fiction Writer
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Florida
Missouri
Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Samuel L. Clemens
Samuel Clemens
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More quotes by Mark Twain

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I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.
Mark Twain
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He was endowed with a stupidity which by the least little stretch would go around the globe four times and tie.
Mark Twain
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I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.
Mark Twain
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Time spent with your children is time wisely spent.
Mark Twain
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There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather... In the spring I have counted one hundred and twenty-six different kinds of weather inside of four and twenty hours.
Mark Twain
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I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.
Mark Twain
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Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!
Mark Twain
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... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.
Mark Twain
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You can't throw too much style into a miracle.
Mark Twain
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The human race is a race of cowards and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
Mark Twain
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He wa'n't no common dog, he wa'n't no mongrel he was a composite. A composite dog is a dog that is made up of all the valuable qualities that's in the dog breed-kind of a syndicate and a mongrel is made up of all riffraff that's left over.
Mark Twain
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Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.
Mark Twain
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A mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top.
Mark Twain
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The common eye sees only the outside of things, and judges by that, but the seeing eye pierces through and reads the heart and the soul, finding there capacities which the outside didn't indicate or promise, and which the other kind of eye couldn't detect.
Mark Twain
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Conscience, man's moral medicine chest.
Mark Twain
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Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.
Mark Twain
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The insincerity of man-all men are liars, partial or hiders of facts, half tellers of truths, shirks, moral sneaks. When a merely honest man appears he is a comet-his fame is eternal-needs no genius, no talent-mere honesty
Mark Twain
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We have the best government that money can buy.
Mark Twain
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When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
Mark Twain
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There isn't anything you can't stand if you are only born and bred to it.
Mark Twain