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Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.

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
Books
Use
Experience
Book
Writing
Usable
Make
Judicious
Life
Attempted
Capital

More quotes by Mark Twain

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A pessimist is a well-informed optimist.
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When an audience does not complain, it is a compliment, and when it does, it is a compliment, too, if unaccompanied by violence.
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You can't reason with your heart it has its own laws, and thumps about things which the intellect scorns.
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Eight grown Americans out of ten dread the coming of the Fourth, with its pandemonium and its perils, and they rejoice when it is gone-if still alive.
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Experience, the only logic sure to convince a diseased imagination and restore it to rugged health.
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When an honest writer discovers an imposition it is his simple duty to strip it bare and hurl it down from its place of honor, no matter who suffers by it any other course would render him unworthy of the public confidence.
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No God and no religion can survive ridicule. No political church, no nobility, no royalty or other fraud, can face ridicule in a fair field, and live.
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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 Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world.
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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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Education is what remains when what is learned has been taken away.
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As a rule, we go about with masks, we go about looking honest, and we are able to conceal ourselves all through the day.
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I would rather have my ignorance than another man's knowledge, because I have so much of it.
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College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either.
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The new political gospel: public office is private graft.
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Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul.
Mark Twain
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I never write metropolis for seven cents when I can write city and get paid the same.
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I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: Now here are these two unaccountable freaks they came in together, they must go out together.
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But it was ever thus, all through my life: whenever I have diverged from custom and principle and uttered a truth, the rule has been that the hearer hadn't strength of mind enough to believe it.
Mark Twain
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Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain