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When a library expels a book of mine and leaves an unexpurgated Bible lying around where unprotected youth and age can get hold of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger me.

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
Youth
Unconscious
Deep
Leaves
Expels
Hold
Library
Unprotected
Age
Delight
Censoring
Lying
Anger
Censored
Doesn
Bible
Delights
Around
Mines
Censorship
Book
Mine
Irony

More quotes by Mark Twain

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In God We Trust. It is the choicest compliment that has ever been paid us, and the most gratifying to our feelings. It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased it always sounds well - In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true.
Mark Twain
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Start it at no particular time of your life wander at your free will all over your life talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale.
Mark Twain
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The sole impulse which dictates and compels a man's every act: the imperious necessity of securing his own approval, in every emergency and at all costs.... It is our only spur, our whip, our goad, our impelling power we have no other.
Mark Twain
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Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent then he would have eaten the serpent.
Mark Twain
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The community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.
Mark Twain
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Fortune knocks at every man's door once in a life, but in a good many cases the man is in a neighboring saloon and does not hear her.
Mark Twain
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People are much more willing to lend you books than bookcases.
Mark Twain
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Such is luck! And such the treatment which honest, good perservance gets so often at the hands of unfair and malicious Nature!
Mark Twain
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Every time I read a Jane Austen novel, I feel like a bartender at the gates of heaven.
Mark Twain
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Seasickness: at first you are so sick you are afraid you will die, and then you are so sick you are afraid you won't die.
Mark Twain
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The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession.
Mark Twain
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There are 869 different forms of lying, but only one of them has been squarely forbidden. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Mark Twain
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A dozen direct censures are easier to bear than one morganatic compliment.
Mark Twain
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No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot
Mark Twain
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It has always been a peculiarity of the human race that it keeps two sets of morals in stock-the private and the real, and the public and the artificial.
Mark Twain
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Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain't so.
Mark Twain
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I went to the circus, and loafed around the back side till the watchman went by, and then dived in under the tent. I had my twenty-dollar gold piece and some other money, but I reckoned I better save it.... I ain't opposed to spending money on circuses, when there ain't no other way, but there ain't no use in wasting it on them.
Mark Twain
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It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.
Mark Twain
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The nation is divided, half patriots and half traitors, and no man can tell which from which.
Mark Twain
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Truth is more of a stranger than fiction. When in doubt, tell the truth. If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Most writers regard the truth as their most valuable possession, and therefore are economical in its use.
Mark Twain