Quote

If a spectacle is going to be particularly imposing I prefer to see it through somebody else's eyes, because that man will always exaggerate. Then I can exaggerate his exaggeration, and my account of the thing will be the most impressive.

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
Else
Impressive
Thing
Account
Going
Prefer
Always
Accounts
Exaggerate
Men
Particularly
Copying
Somebody
Spectacle
Eyes
Exaggeration
Eye
Imposing

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No one is willing to acknowledge a fault in himself when a more agreeable motive can be found for the estrangement of his acquaintances.
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An American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.
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I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
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I have tried getting up early, and I have tried getting up late-and the latter agrees with me best.
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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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I was warned to stop smoking, which I did, for two or three days, but it was too lonesome, and I have resumed - in a modified way - 4 smokes a day instead of 40. This will have a good effect. On the bank balance.
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It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
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This is the year 1492. I am eighty-two years of age. The things I am going to tell you are things which I saw myself as a child and as a youth.
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Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights...sexual intercourse!...His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values.
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Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
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The average man don't like trouble and danger.
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Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.
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We all do no end of feeling, and we mistake it for thinking.
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The source of all humor is not laughter, but sorrow.
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Great enterprises usually promise vastly more than they perform.
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I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions against which to revolute.
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I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it.
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Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.
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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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Don't look at the world with your hands in your pockets. To write about it you have to reach out and touch it.
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