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Compliments make me vain: & when I am vain, I am insolent & overbearing. It is a pity, too, because I love compliments. I love them even when they are not so. My child, I can live on a good compliment two weeks with nothing else to eat.

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
Nothing
Weeks
Children
Vain
Even
Pity
Make
Week
Good
Child
Overbearing
Love
Else
Insolent
Two
Compliments
Live
Compliment

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Conformity—the natural instinct to passively yield to that vague something recognized as authority.
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While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.
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Prophesy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.
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Humor is the good natured side of a truth.
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That is a simple rule, and easy to remember. When I, a thoughtful and unblessed Presbyterian, examine the Koran, I know that beyond any question every Mohammedan is insane not in all things, but in religious matters.
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It is easier to stay out than get out.
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I don't believe any of you have ever read Paradise Lost, and you don't want to. That's something that you just want to take on trust. It's a classic ... something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.
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Circumstance - which moves by laws of its own, regardless of parties and policies, and whose decrees are final and must be obeyed by all - and will be
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In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing the local papers said nothing against it the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.
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Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.
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I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.
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Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.
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If work were so pleasant, the rich would keep it for themselves.
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Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene
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The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all.
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You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present you should have recognized them earlier.
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He [George Washington Cable] has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.
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Homely truth is unpalatable.
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We write frankly and freely, but then we modify before we print.
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I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
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