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The convention missionaries call modesty has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anybody's whim - anybody's diseased caprice.

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
Reason
Subject
Diseased
Standards
Whim
Therefore
Convention
Anybody
Clothings
Subjects
Modesty
Call
Conventions
Artificiality
Nature
Opposed
Caprice
Cannot
Standard
Missionaries

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I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army.
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The Indian may seem poor to we rich Westerners but in matters of the spirit it is we who are the paupers and they who are millionaires.
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After my marriage she edited everything I wrote. And what is more, she not only edited my works, she edited me.
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One mustn't criticize other people on grounds where he can't stand perpendicular himself
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The reason most people don't go to church is because they've already been.
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It has been said that a Scotchman has not seen the world until he has seen Edinburgh and I think that I may say that an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi Gras in New Orleans.
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The best of us would rather be popular than right.
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America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.
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The ignorant are afraid to betray surprise or admiration...they think it ill manners.
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Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.
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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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Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities Truth isn't.
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There ain't nothing more to write about and I'm rotten glad of it, because if I'd know'd what trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn't a tackled it.
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There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
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I have stopped smoking now and then, for a few months at a time, but it was not on principle, it was only to show off it was to pulverize those critics who said I was a slave to my habits and couldn't break my bonds.
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There are people who can do all fine and heroic things but one - keep from telling their happiness to the unhappy.
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Etiquette requires us to admire the human race.
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I am only human, although I regret it.
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We are always more anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess, than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
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When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.
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