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Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.

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
Literature
Delicacy
Family
Obscene
Two
Belonging
Stories
Circle
Best
Circles
Things
Narrative
Belongings
False
Robs
Among
Narratives

More quotes by Mark Twain

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Training- training is everything training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature it is folly there is no such thing as nature what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own they are transmitted to us, trained into us.
Mark Twain
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My mind changes often ... People who have no mind can easily be steadfast and firm, but when a man is loaded down to the guards with it, as I am, every heavy sea of foreboding or inclination, maybe of indolence, shifts the cargo.
Mark Twain
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Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people.
Mark Twain
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A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.
Mark Twain
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Start it at no particular time of your life wander at your free will all over your life talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale.
Mark Twain
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One compliment can keep me going for a whole month.
Mark Twain
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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!
Mark Twain
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The cayote is a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry. He is always poor, out of luck and friendless. The meanest creatures despise him, and even the fleas would desert him for a velocipede.
Mark Twain
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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.
Mark Twain
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A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
Mark Twain
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Imagine, if you will, that I am an idiot. Then, imagine that I am also a Congressman. But, alas, I repeat myself.
Mark Twain
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It is your human environment that makes climate
Mark Twain
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More than two hundred death penalties are gone from the law books, but the [biblical] texts that authorised them remain.
Mark Twain
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America cannot have an empire abroad and a Republic at home.
Mark Twain
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Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.
Mark Twain
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While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.
Mark Twain
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When the world is made to be idiot-proof, the world will become overpopulated with idiots.
Mark Twain
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Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die.
Mark Twain
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I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.
Mark Twain
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Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it -- namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain.
Mark Twain