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Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.

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
Men
Neglect
Uncomfortable
Sake
Duty
Performs
Making
Agreeable
Spirit
Performed
Make
Duties
Would
Accountability

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A newspaper is not just for reporting the news as it is, but to make people mad enough to do something about it.
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Great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they perform.
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It has taken a weary long time to persuade American Presbyterians to give up infant damnation and try to bear it the best they can.
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Imagination labors best in distant fields.
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We must put up with clothes as they are they have their reason for existing. They are on us to expose us to advertise what we wear them to conceal.
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It usually takes more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech. Overnight success is a fallacy. It is preceded by a great deal of preparation. Ask any successful person how they came to this point in their lives, and they will have a story to tell.
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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.
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God's great cosmic joke on the human race was requiring that men and women live together in marriage
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I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
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Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
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A circle is a round straight line with a hole in the middle.
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Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church.
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From the dome of St. Peter's one can see every notable object in Rome... He can see a panorama that is varied, extensive, beautiful to the eye, and more illustrious in history than any other in Europe.
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What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. . . . The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. . . . When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world.
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He charged nothing for his preaching and it was worth it too.
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If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be — a Christian.
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There have been innumerable Temporary Seekers after the Truth-have you ever heard of a permanent one?
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I have damaged my intellect trying to imagine why a man should want to invent a repeating clock, and how another man could be found to lust after it and buy it. The man who can guess these riddles is far on the way to guess why the human race was invented - which is another riddle which tires me.
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Don't wait the time is never just right.
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Don't go to sleep, so many people die there.
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