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A person who has a cat by the tail knows a whole lot more about cats than someone who has just read about them.

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
Cat
Read
Someone
Persons
Person
Tail
Whole
Tails
Cats
Excellence

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Once you've put one of his [Henry James] books down, you simply can't pick it up again.
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...Man is a marvelous curiosity. When he is at his very very best he is a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm. Yet he blandly and in all sincerity calls himself the 'noblest work of God.'
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If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
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A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
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I never write Metropolis for seven cents because I can get the same price for city. I never write policeman because I can get the same money for cop.
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A man with a hump-backed uncle mustn't make fun of another man's cross-eyed aunt
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Humor is the great thing, the saving thing after all. The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.
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No one can tell me what is a good cigar - for me. I am the only judge. People who claim to know say that I smoke the worst cigars in the world. They bring their own cigars when they come to my house.
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At 50, a man can be an ass without being an optimist but not an optimist without being an ass
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Stars and shadows ain't good to see by.
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Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
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The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it.
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Dying man couldn't make up his mind which place to go to-both have their advantages, heaven for the climate, hell for the company!
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Heaven is the very last place to come to rest and don't you be afraid to bet on that!
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A man may plan as much as he wants to, but nothing of consequence is likely to come of it until the magician circumstance steps in and takes the matter off his hands.
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Foreigners cannot enjoy our food, I suppose, any more than we can enjoy theirs. It is not strange for tastes are made, not born. I might glorify my bill of fare until I was tired but after all, the Scotchman would shake his head and say, 'Where's your haggis?' and the Fijan would sigh and say, 'Where's your missionary?'
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction.
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[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.
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I have criticized absent people so often, and then discovered, to my humiliation, that I was talking with their relatives, that I have grown superstitious about that sort of thing and dropped it.
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When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
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