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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

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The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.
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Words are only painted fire, a look is the fire itself. She gave that look, and carried it away to the treasury of heaven, where all things that are divine belong.
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I think that the reason why we Americans seem to be so addicted to trying to get rich suddenly is merely because the opportunity to make promising efforts in that direction has offered itself to us with a frequency out of all proportion to the European experience.
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The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness--your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture....He takes upon himself to be the week-day preacher.
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There is no sadder sight than a young pessimist.
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If the desire to kill and the opportunity to kill came always together, who would escape hanging?
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Too much is just enough.
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Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.
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Do something everyday that you don't want to do.
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You try to tell me anything about the newspaper business! Sir, I have been through it from Alpha to Omaha, and I tell you that the less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.
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That's just the way: a person does a low-down thing, and then he don't want to take no consequences of it. Thinks as long as he can hide it, it ain't no disgrace.
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No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.
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Methuselah lived to be 969 years old . You boys and girls will see more in the next fifty years than Methuselah saw in his whole lifetime.
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All the territorial possessions of all the political establishments in the earth--including America, of course-- consist of pilferings from other people's wash. No tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty occupies a foot of land that was not stolen.
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To write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers pay within three years, the candidate may look upon this circumstance with the most implicit confidence as the sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.
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There are some few people I respect and admire, but I don't think much of the species.
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A sincere compliment is always grateful to a lady, so long as you don't try to knock her down with it.
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Great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they perform.
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I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.
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I don't know anything about this man. Anyhow, I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail, and the other is, I don't know why.
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