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We love old travelers: we love to hear them prate, drivel and lie we love them for their asinine vanity, their ability to bore, their luxuriant fertility of imagination, their startling, brilliant, overwhelming mendacity.

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
Ability
Traveler
Asinine
Lying
Bores
Luxuriant
Love
Overwhelming
Mendacity
Vanity
Drivel
Brilliant
Travelers
Travel
Startling
Hear
Fertility
Imagination
Bore
Prate

More quotes by Mark Twain

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What a lumbering poor vehicle prose is for the conveying of a great thought! ... Prose wanders around with a lantern & laboriously schedules & verifies the details & particulars of a valley & its frame of crags & peaks, then Poetry comes, & lays bare the whole landscape with a single splendid flash.
Mark Twain
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Man is a marvelous curiosity...he thinks he is the Creator's pet...he even believes the Creator loves him has passion for him sits up nights to admire him yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks he listens. Isn't it a quaint idea.
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The reason most people don't go to church is because they've already been.
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I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.
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Change is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.
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That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it.
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The happy phrasing of a compliment is one of the rarest of human gifts, and the happy delivery of it another.
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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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Never miss an opportunity to shut up.
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All you drunkards: Put down the intoxicating Vanity Metrics.
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A man who keeps company with glaciers comes to feel tolerably insignificiant by and by. The Alps and the glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work.
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It is easier to stay out than get out.
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My own luck has been curious all my literary life I never could tell a lie that anyone would doubt, nor a truth that anybody would believe.
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As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and ... Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.
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.
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To trust the God of the Bible is to trust an irascible, vindictive, fierce and ever fickle and changeful master.
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Oh Death where is thy sting! It has none. But life has.
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Morals consist of political morals, commercial morals, ecclesiastical morals, and morals.
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Balloon: Thing to take meteroric observations and commit suicide with.
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Ours is the land of the free-nobody denies that-nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.)
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