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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
Usable
Writing
Judicious
Make
Attempted
Life
Capital

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When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself.
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If we would learn what the human race really is at bottom, we need only observe it in election times.
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Of all God's creatures, there is only one that cannot be made slave of the leash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve the man, but it would deteriorate the cat.
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Those people.... early stricken of God, intellectually - the departmental interpreters of the laws in Washington... can always be depended on to take any reasonably good law and interpret the common sense all out of it.
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No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave.
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What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it.
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Love is an irreresisistible desire to be irresistibily desired.
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There is this trouble about special providences namely, there is so often a doubt as to which party was intended to be the beneficiary. In the case of the children, the bears, and the prophet, the bears got more real satisfaction out of the episode than the prophet did, because they got the children.
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The first time a student realizes that a little learning is a dangerous thing is when he brings home a poor report card.
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We can't always have the beautiful aspect of things. Let us make the most of our sights that are beautiful and let the others go
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I wish I could make him understand that a loving good heart is riches enough, and that without it intellect is poverty.
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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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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.
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To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else -- these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial.
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The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it.
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When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it's a sure sign you're getting old.
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The law of work does seem utterly unfair-but there it is, and nothing can change it: the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, too.
Mark Twain
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It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.
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Too bad that youth is wasted on the young.
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Data is like garbage. You'd better know what you are going to do with it before you collect it.
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