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

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Except a person be part coward, it is not a compliment to say he is brave.
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I was educated, I was trained, I was a Presbyterian and I knew how these things are done. I knew that in Biblical times if a man committed a sin the extermination of the whole surrounding nation-cattle and all-was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after.
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The peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart-and we consider this one of the signs of savagery.
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There isn't anything you can't stand if you are only born and bred to it.
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A good lawyer knows the law a clever one takes the judge to lunch.
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Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.
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The choir always tittered and whispered all through the service. There was once a church choir that was not ill-bred, but I have forgotten where it was.
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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.
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Time spent with your children is time wisely spent.
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I am living a new and exalted life of late. It steeps me in a sacred rapture to see a portrait develop and take soul under my hand. First, I throw off a study - just a mere study, a few apparently random lines - and to look at it you would hardly ever suspect who it was going to be even I cannot tell, myself.
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God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention.
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Behold, the fool saith, Put not all thine eggs in the one basket - which is but a matter of saying, Scatter your money and your attention but the wise man saith, Pull all your eggs in the one basket and - WATCH THAT BASKET. - Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
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One may make their house a palace of sham, or they can make it a home, a refuge.
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The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost - not another man's - is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases.
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The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.
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Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
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When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
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When I was 17, my father was so stupid, I didn't want to be seen with him in public. When I was 24, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in just 7 years.
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I have not professionally dealt in truth. Many when they come to die have spent all the truth that was in them, and enter the next world as paupers. I have saved up enough to make an astonishment there.
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When I take up one of Jane Austen's books ... I feel like a barkeep entering the kingdom of heaven. I know what his sensation would be and his private comments. He would not find the place to his taste, and he would probably say so.
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