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

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I always take Scotch whiskey at night as a preventive of toothache. I have never had the toothache and what is more, I never intend to have it.
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One learns peoples through the heart, not the eyes or the intellect.
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If God is what people say there can be no one in the universe so unhappy as He for He sees unceasingly myriads of His creatures suffering unspeakable miseries--and besides this foresees how they are going to suffer during the remainder of their lives. One might as well say, As unhappy as God.
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All schools, all colleges have two great functions: to confer, and to conceal valuable knowledge.
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Temperate temperance is best intemperate temperance injures the cause of temperance.
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Strip the human race, absolutely naked, and it would be a real democracy. But the introduction of even a rag of tiger skin, or a cowtail, could make a badge of distinction and be the beginning of a monarchy.
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Why is it that, among men, physical courage is a trait so plenteous yet moral courage is a trait so rare?
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I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: Now here are these two unaccountable freaks they came in together, they must go out together.
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In the laboratory there are no fustian ranks, no brummagem aristocracies the domain of Science is a republic, and all its citizens are brothers and equals, its princes of Monaco and its stonemasons of Cromarty meeting, barren of man-made gauds and meretricious decorations, upon the one majestic level!
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Grown people everywhere are always likely to cling to the religion they were brought up in.
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A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval.
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In Marseilles they make half the toilet soap we consume in America, but the Marseillaise only have a vague theoretical idea of its use, which they have obtained from books of travel.
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I have a religion-but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor.....Perhaps your religion will sustain you,will feed you-I place no dependence in mine. Our religions are alike, though, in one respect-neither can make a man happy when he is out of luck.
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It may have happened, it may not have happened but it could have happened.
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There are things which some people never attempt during their whole lives, but one of these is not poetry. Poetry attacks all human beings sooner or later, and, like the measles, is mild or violent according to the age of the sufferer.
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Gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating like blackmail the more you pay, the more is exacted.
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Children have but little charity for one another's defects
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Do something everyday that you don't want to do this is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain.
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Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty - the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself.
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I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
Mark Twain