Quote

I speak French with timidity, and not flowingly--except when excited. When using that language I have often noticed that I have hardly ever been mistaken for a Frenchman, except, perhaps, by horses never, I believe, by people.

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
Language
Noticed
Often
Hardly
Speak
French
Ever
Excited
Frenchman
Believe
Using
Frenchmen
Never
Horse
Timidity
People
Except
Horses
Perhaps
Mistaken

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I have spent most of my time worrying about things that have never happened. Worrying is not an action! In fact, it is action that alleviates concern and dissipates worries. Take more actions when you feel that worry is creeping in to steal your time. It need not be a huge action, any action in the direction you want to go will do.
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We wish to learn all the curious, outlandish ways of all the different countries, so that we can show off and astonish people when we get home. We wish to excite the envy of our untraveled friends with our strange foreign fashions which we can't shake off.
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Damn these human beings if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.
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To forget pain is to be painless to forget care is to be rid of it to go abroad is to accomplish both.
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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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Thanksgiving Day - Let all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks, now, but the turkeys. In the island of Fiji they do not use turkeys, they use plumbers. It does not become you and me to sneer at Fiji.
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When grown-up persons indulge in practical jokes, the fact gauges them. They have lived narrow, obscure, and ignorant lives, and at full manhood they still retain and cherish a job lot of left-over standards and ideals that would have been discarded with their boyhood if they had then moved out into the world and a broader life.
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The human race is a race of cowards and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
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It is easier for a cannibal to enter the Kingdom of Heaven through the eye of a rich man's needle that it is for any other foreigner to read the terrible German script.
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Civilization largely consists in hiding human nature. When the barbarian learns to hide it we account him enlightened.
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The cat, having sat upon a hot stove lid, will not sit upon a hot stove lid again. Nor upon a cold stove lid.
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The pulpit and the optimist are always talking about the human race's steady march toward ultimate perfection. As usual, they leave out the statistics. It is the pulpit's way - the optimist's way.
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We are discreet sheep we wait to see how the drove is going, and then go with the drove.
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Work is a necessary evil to be avoided.
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I am losing enough sleep to supply a worn-out army.
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Many public-school children seem to know only two dates—1492 and 4th of July and as a rule they don't know what happened on either occasion.
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In forgiving, people are not being asked to forget. On the contrary, it is important to remember, so that we should not let such atrocities happen again. Forgiveness does not mean condoning what has been done. It means taking what happened seriously...drawing out the sting in the memory that threatens our entire existence.
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As a rule we develop a borrowed European idea forward, and ... Europe develops a borrowed American idea backwards.
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the more I know about people, the better I like my dogs.
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The physician who knows only medicine, knows not even medicine.
Mark Twain