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I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.

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
Something
Wants
Believe
Everybody
Reading
Read
Paradise
Lost
Classic
Ever
Poetry
Book
Nobody
Take
Trust

More quotes by Mark Twain

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Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.
Mark Twain
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Whenever the human race assembles to a number exceeding four, it cannot stand free speech.
Mark Twain
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We take a natural interest in novelties, but it is against nature to take an interest in familiar things.
Mark Twain
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Each man is afraid of his neighbor's disapproval - a thing which, to the general run of the human race, is more dreaded than wolves and death.
Mark Twain
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I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age in 1977 I shall be 142.
Mark Twain
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A tax is a fine for doing well, a fine is a tax for doing wrong.
Mark Twain
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The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners.
Mark Twain
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If God had meant for us to be naked, we'd have been born that way.
Mark Twain
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Some things you can't find out but you will never know you can't by guessing and supposing: no, you have to be patient and go on experimenting until you find out that you can't find out.
Mark Twain
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There are too many stars in some places and not enough in others.
Mark Twain
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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.
Mark Twain
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Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first! Aunt Polly about Tom Sawyer
Mark Twain
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To be, or not to be that is the bare bodkin That makes calamity of so long life.
Mark Twain
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India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.
Mark Twain
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Two things seemed pretty apparent to me. One was that in order to be a pilot a man had to learn more than any one man ought to learn and the other was that he must learn it all over again in a different way every 24 hours.
Mark Twain
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The vast majority of the race whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind at heart and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves.
Mark Twain
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To get the full value of joy You must have someone to divide it with. After all these years I see that I was mistaken about Eve in the beginning it is better to live outside the Garden with her than inside it without her.
Mark Twain
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All emotion is involuntary when genuine.
Mark Twain
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Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.
Mark Twain
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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.
Mark Twain