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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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All say, ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.
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That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.
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I pity the fellow who has to create a dialect or paraphrase the dictionary to get laughs. I can't spell, but I have never stooped to spell cat with a 'k' to get at your funny bone. I love a drink, but I never encouraged drunkenness by harping on its alleged funny side.
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We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.
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He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
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Your actions speak so much louder than words.
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Italy is the home of art and swindling home of religion and moral rottenness
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A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt
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Drop this mean and sordid and selfish devotion to the saving of your shabby little souls, and hunt up something to do that's got some dignity to it! Risk your souls! Risk them in good causes then if you lose them, why should you care? Reform!
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To eat is human, to digest, divine
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I know all those people. I have friendly, social, and criminal relations with the whole lot of them.
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To be good is noble but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
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Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.
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Too much is just enough.
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So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.
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Nothing is so ignorant as a man's left hand, except a lady's watch.
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I have at last, after several months' experience, made up my mind that [New York] is a splendid desert--a domed and steepled solitude, where the stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race.
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I've come loaded with statistics, for I've noticed that a man can't prove anything without statistics. No man can.
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Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel.
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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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