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Benaras is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together!

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
Twice
Older
Tradition
History
Together
Looks
Even
Legend
Legends

More quotes by Mark Twain

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I have never examined the subject of humor until now. I am surprised to find how much ground it covers. I have got its divisions and frontiers down on a piece of paper. I find it defined as a production of the brain, as the power of the brain to produce something humorous, and the capacity of percieving humor.
Mark Twain
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The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book- a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day.
Mark Twain
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God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New--the Jekyl and Hyde of sacred romance.
Mark Twain
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If the world comes to an end, I want to be in Cincinnati. Everything comes there ten years later.
Mark Twain
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....try the mustard, - a man can't know what turnips are in perfection without mustard.
Mark Twain
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I never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with the blessed peace, as I did yesterday when I learned that Michael Angelo was dead.
Mark Twain
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Why is it that, among men, physical courage is a trait so plenteous yet moral courage is a trait so rare?
Mark Twain
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Thanksgiving Day - Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.
Mark Twain
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... No photograph ever was good, yet, of anybody - hunger and thirst and utter wretchedness overtake the outlaw who invented it! It transforms into desperadoes the weakest of men depicts sinless innocence upon the pictured faces of ruffians gives the wise man the stupid leer of a fool, and the fool an expression of more than earthly wisdom.
Mark Twain
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A round man cannot be expected to fit in a square hole right away. He must have time to modify his shape.
Mark Twain
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When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Kentucky, because everything there happens 20 years after it happens anywhere else.
Mark Twain
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Distance lends enchantment to the view.
Mark Twain
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The lie, as a virtue, a principle, is eternal the lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man's best and surest friend is immortal
Mark Twain
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What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery!
Mark Twain
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The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Mark Twain
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Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
Mark Twain
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When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.
Mark Twain
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There is no family in America without a clock, and consequently there is no fair pretext for the usual Sunday medley of dreadful sounds that issues from our steeples.
Mark Twain
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The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another.
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