Quote

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.

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
Seems
Wander
Incongruity
Together
Correct
Innocently
Sometimes
Basis
Absurdities
Writing
Bases
Unaware
Way
Seem
Wandering
Position
String
American
Absurdity
Incongruities
Art
Strings
Purposeless

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All war must be just the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it.
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We don't cut up when mad men are bred by the old legitimate regular stock religions, but we can't allow wildcat religions to indulge in such disastrous experiments.
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One must travel, to learn.
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I heard a Californian student in Heidelberg say, in one of his calmest moods, that he would rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.
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Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.
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A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificant by and by.
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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.
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There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought -a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!
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A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
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There is only one good sex. The female one.
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I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.
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I was born with Halley's Comet and I expect to die upon its return
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There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that.
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He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever.
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It's easy to make friends, but hard to get rid of them.
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It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
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Of all the animals, man is the only one that is cruel. He is the only one that inflicts pain for the pleasure of doing it.
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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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The less a man knows the bigger the noise he makes and the higher the salary he commands.
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Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
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