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Wisdom teaches us that none but birds should go out early, and that not even birds should do it unless they are out of worms.

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
Birds
Bird
None
Early
Unless
Wisdom
Teach
Worms
Even
Teaches

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There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.
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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.
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We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than Heredity Privilege.
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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.
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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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A good and wholesome thing is a little harmless fun in this world it tones a body up and keeps him human and prevents him from souring.
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If you invent two or three people and turn them loose in your manuscript, something is bound to happen to them -- you can't help it and then it will take you the rest of the book to get them out of the natural consequences of that occurrence, and so first thing you know, there's your book all finished up and never cost you an idea.
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I was standing in our dining-room thinking of nothing in particular, when a cablegram was put into my hand. It said, 'Susy was peacefully released today.' It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.
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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!
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We Americans are the most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the earth and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen.
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I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.
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Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene
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Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought.
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Be respectful to your superiors, if you have any.
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Sagebrush is a very fair fuel, but as a vegetable it is a distinguished failure. Nothing can abide the taste of it but the jackass and his illegitimate child the mule.
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Morals are not the important thing-nor enlightenment-nor civilization. A man can do absolutely well without them, but he can't do without something to eat. The supremest thing is the need of the body, not of the mind and spirit.
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Apparently one of the most uncertain things in the world is the funeral of a religion.
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The election makes me think of a story of a man who was dying. He had only two minutes to live, so he sent for a clergyman and asked him, Where is the best place to go to? He was undecided about it. So the minister told him that each place had its advantages--heaven for climate, and hell for society.
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