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What do we call love, hate, charity, revenge, humanity, forgiveness? Different results of the master impulse, the necessity of securing one's self-approval.

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
Life
Results
Approval
Humanity
Necessity
Call
Revenge
Success
Impulse
Hate
Forgiveness
Self
Charity
Different
Master
Love
Masters
Securing

More quotes by Mark Twain

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Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it.
Mark Twain
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France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.
Mark Twain
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I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.
Mark Twain
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Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.
Mark Twain
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isn't so astonishing, the number of things that I can remember, as the number of things I can remember that aren't so.
Mark Twain
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Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.
Mark Twain
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I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
Mark Twain
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We have not the reverent feeling for the rainbow that the savage has, because we know how it is made. We have lost as much as we gained by prying into that matter.
Mark Twain
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When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.
Mark Twain
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There is nothing in the world like a persuasive speech to fuddle the mental apparatus and upset the convictions and debauch the emotions of an audience not practiced in the tricks and delusions of oratory
Mark Twain
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There is no use in your walking five miles to fish when you can depend on being just as unsuccessful near home.
Mark Twain
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Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.
Mark Twain
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Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.
Mark Twain
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For England must not fall: it would mean an inundation of Russian & German political degradations which would envelop the globe & steep it in a sort of Middle-Age night & slaverly which would last till Christ comes again - which I hope he will not do he made trouble enough before.
Mark Twain
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It is human to exaggerate the merits of the dead.
Mark Twain
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You perceive I generalize with intrepidity from single instances. It is the tourist's custom.
Mark Twain
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We need not worry so much about what man descends from it's what he descends to that shames the human race.
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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India is, the cradle of the human race, the birthplace of human speech, the mother of history, the grandmother of legend, and the great grand mother of tradition. our most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India only.
Mark Twain
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Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!
Mark Twain