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The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the tellingthe comic and the witty story upon the matter.

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
American
Comic
Upon
Effect
Stories
English
Matter
Telling
Effects
Witty
Depends
Manner
Humor
French
Story
Humorous

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A powerful agent is the right word. Whenever we come upon one of those intensely right words in a book or newspaper the resulting effect is physical as well as spiritual, and electrically prompt.
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If you take epitaphs seriously, we ought to bury the living and resurrect the dead.
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I've lived through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.
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Don't go to sleep, so many people die there.
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Now he found out a new thing--namely, that to promise not to do a thing is the surest way in the world to make a body want to go and do that very thing.
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Circumstance - which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final and must be obeyed by all - and will be
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There ain't no way to find out why a snorer can't hear himself snore.
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Human beings are the only creatures who blush - or who need to.
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I could never learn to like her, except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.
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Honor is a harder master than the law.
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In literature imitations do not imitate.
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The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nations, and from the mass of the nation only-not from its privileged classes.
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Broad, wholesome, charitable views .. can not be acquired by vegetating in one's little corner of the earth.
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Teaching is like trying to hold 35 corks underwater at once.
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Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress but I repeat myself.
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Astonishing things can be done with the human memory if you will devote it faithfully to one particular line of business.
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When a person is accustomed to one hundred and thirty-eight in the shade, his ideas about cold weather are not valuable.
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There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.
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...there isn't often anything in Wagner opera that one would call by such a violent name as acting.
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You want to be very careful about lying otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught.
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