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Guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.

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
Masters
American
Cannot
Subtleties
Subtlety
Joke
Guides
Master
Jokes

More quotes by Mark Twain

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We Americans worship the almighty dollar! Well, it is a worthier god than Heredity Privilege.
Mark Twain
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Humor is the good natured side of a truth.
Mark Twain
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Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
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In my nostrils still lives the breath of flowers that perished twenty years ago.
Mark Twain
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God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.
Mark Twain
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You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present you should have recognized them earlier.
Mark Twain
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I was born with Halley's Comet and I expect to die upon its return
Mark Twain
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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.
Mark Twain
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It's an epitome of life. The first half of it consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance the last half consists of the chance without the capacity.
Mark Twain
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A banker is somebody who lends you an umbrella & takes it away as soon as it starts raining.
Mark Twain
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I never made a success of a lecture delivered in a church yet. People are afraid to laugh in a church. They can't be made to do it in any possible way.
Mark Twain
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I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves they got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you can never tell what a publisher will do. I have been one myself.
Mark Twain
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We are always too busy for our children we never give them the time or interest they deserve. We lavish gifts upon them but the most precious gift, our personal association, which means so much to them, we give grudgingly.
Mark Twain
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Experience of life (not of books) is the only capital usable in such a book as you have attempted one can make no judicious use of this capital while it is new.
Mark Twain
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One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.
Mark Twain
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I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair & reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it. The proof-reading on the P & Pauper cost me the last rags of my religion.
Mark Twain
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Man can seldom - very, very, seldom - fight a winning fight against his training the odds are too heavy.
Mark Twain
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In the first place, God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.
Mark Twain
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Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping. . . you'd see the ax flash and come down-you don't hear nothing you see the ax go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k'chunk!-it had took all that time to come over the water.
Mark Twain
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All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.
Mark Twain