Quote

What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.

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
Great
Details
Valleys
Conveying
Verifies
Poetry
Vehicle
Verify
Crags
Single
Flash
Peaks
Lumbering
Poor
Crafts
Schedules
Laboriously
Comes
Prose
Valley
Lantern
Around
Wander
Bare
Wanders
Thought
Landscape
Splendid
Lanterns
Whole
Lays
Frame
Particulars

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A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt
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If God had meant for us to be naked, we'd have been born that way.
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I felt it was my duty to praise all of God's works with fervent enthusiasm. At the same time I killed flies in my house in a spirit of hatred, exasperation and contempt. My praise to God for all his works was dishonest, the act of killing the fly was honest.
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Whenever a copyright law is to be made or altered, then the idiots assemble.
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Difference between savage and civilized man: one is painted, the other gilded.
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I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.
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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.
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The Christian's Bible is a drug store. Its contents remain the same, but the medical practice changes.
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The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.
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What ought to be done to the man who invented the celebrating of anniversaries? Mere killing would be too light.
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The difference between those that succeed and those that fail is, those that succeeded tried.
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You cannot have all chiefs you gotta have Indians too. Perfect love cannot be without equality. A friend to everybody and to nobody is the same thing. We are all alike, on the inside.
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His ignorance covers the world like a blanket, and there's scarcely a hole in it anywhere.
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The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the life too closely examined may not be lived at all.
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The ancients stole all our ideas from us.
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But death was sweet, death was gentle, death was kind death healed the bruised spirit and the broken heart, and gave them rest and forgetfulness death was man’s best friend when man could endure life no longer, death came and set him free.
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My own luck has been curious all my literary life I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
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[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.
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It may be called the Master Passion, the hunger for self-approval.
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I could forgive the boy, now, if he'd committed a million sins!
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