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If you had made the acquiring of ignorance the study of your life, you could not have graduated with higher honor than you could to-day.

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
Graduated
Ignorance
Honor
Higher
Study
Made
Life
Acquiring

More quotes by Mark Twain

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Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle headedness - and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all, that is what I was at nineteen and twenty.
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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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As an example to others, and not that I care for moderation myself, it has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain from smoking when awake.
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Man seems to be a rickety poor sort of thing, any way you take him a kind of British Museum of infirmities and inferiorities. He is always undergoing repairs. A machine that was as unreliable as he is would have no market.
Mark Twain
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I've seen many troubles in my time, only half of which ever came true.
Mark Twain
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Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
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The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it.
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It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.
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To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement.
Mark Twain
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Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.
Mark Twain
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Thanksgiving day. Let us all give humble, hearty, and sincere thanks now, but the turkeys.
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Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink - under any circumstances.
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Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for.
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There is not a single human characteristic that can be safely labeled as American.
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I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which would kill anybody else... I will offer here, as a sound maxim, this: That we can't reach old age by another man's road.
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Children are natural mimics who act like their parents despite every effort to teach them good manners.
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If I were going to construct a God I would furnish him with some ways and qualities and characteristics which the Present One lacks... He would spend some of His eternities in trying to forgive Himself for making man unhappy when He could have made him happy with the same effort and He would spend the rest of them in studying astronomy.
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There is no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope.
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No one is sane, straight along, year in and year out, and we all know it. Our insanities are of varying sorts, and express themselves in varying forms-fortunately harmless forms as a rule.
Mark Twain
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I said nothing of the sort.
Mark Twain