Quote

The moral of it is this: If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence but if you are 'no account,' go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not. Thus you become a blessing to your friends by ceasing to be a nuisance to them-if the people you go among suffer by the operation.

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
Away
Thus
Nuisance
Become
Blessing
Diligence
Home
Among
Operation
Work
Stay
Account
Way
Moral
Operations
Make
Friends
Faithful
People
Suffering
Suffer
Whether
Accounts
Ceasing

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To me [Edgar Allen Poe's] prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin's [sic]. No there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death.
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when the human race is not grotesque it is because it is asleep and losing its opportunity.
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Education is what you must acquire without any interference from your schooling.
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It shames the average man to be valued below his own estimate of his worth.
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The solution to our water problems is more rain.
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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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I persuaded him to throw the dirk away and it was as easy as persuading a child to give up some bright fresh new way of killing itself.
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Nothing spoils a good story like the arrival of an eyewitness.
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You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,' but that ain't no matter. That book was made by a Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.
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When the Lord finished the world, he pronounced it good. That is what I said about my first work, too. But Time, I tell you, Time takes the confidence out of these incautious opinions. It is more than likely that He thinks about the world, now, pretty much as I think about the Innocents Abroad. The fact is, there is a trifle too much water in both.
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I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
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In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing the local papers said nothing against it the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.
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The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it.
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The fear of lightning is one of the most distressing infirmities a human being can be afflicted with. It is mostly confined to women, but now and then you find it in a little dog, and sometimes a man.
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We all like to see people sea-sick when we are not ourselves.
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No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot
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Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.
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When people do not respect us we are sharply offended yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.
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