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

More quotes by Mark Twain

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To forget pain is to be painless to forget care is to be rid of it to go abroad is to accomplish both.
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The trouble with most of us is that we know too much that ain't so.
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Every man is in his own person the whole human race without a detail lacking....I knew I should not find in any philosophy a single thought which had not passed through my own head, nor a single thought which had not passed through the heads of millions and millions of men before I was born.
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I ordinarily smoke fifteen cigars during my five hours' labours, and if my interest reaches the enthusiastic point, I smoke more. I smoke with all my might, and allow no intervals.
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Wit and Humor - if any difference, it is in duration - lightning and electric light. Same material, apparently but one is vivid, and can do damage - the other fools along and enjoys elaboration.
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It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want—oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!
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Be good and you'll be lonesome
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Now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates.
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Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.
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I have done more for San Francisco than any of its old residents. Since I left there it has increased in population fully 300,000. I could have done more - I could have gone earlier - it was suggested.
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Let us consider that we are all insane. It will explain us to each other. It will unriddle many riddles
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You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present you should have recognized them earlier.
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I don't want my girl to be so skinny she can knife me with her knee.
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Between believing a thing and thinking you KNOW is only a small step and quickly taken.
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Eating and sleeping are the only activities that should be allowed to interrupt a man's enjoyment of his cigar.
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It's an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
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We have an insanity plea that would have saved Cain.
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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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A banquet is probably the most fatiguing thing in the world except ditchdigging. It is the insanest of all recreations. The inventor of it overlooked no detail that could furnish weariness, distress, harassment, and acute and long-sustained misery of mind and body.
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It is at our mother's knee that we acquire our noblest and truest and highest ideals.
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