Quote

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.

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
Made
Ways
Qualities
Eternities
Way
Study
Forgive
Furnish
Would
Effort
Forgiving
Lacks
Men
Quality
Unhappy
Construct
Happy
Eternity
Astronomy
Making
Spend
Constructs
Trying
Rest
Studying
Going
Present
Characteristics

More quotes by Mark Twain

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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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We are called the nation of inventors. And we are. We could still claim that title and wear its loftiest honors if we had stopped with the first thing we ever invented, which was human liberty.
Mark Twain
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It is higher and nobler to be kind.
Mark Twain
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Circumstances make man, not man circumstances.
Mark Twain
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A powerful agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it plain.
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The proverb says, Born lucky, always lucky, and I am very superstitious. As a small boy I was notoriously lucky. It was usual for one or two of our lads (per annum) to get drowned in the Mississippi or in Bear Creek, but I was pulled out in a 2/3 drowned condition 9 times before I learned to swim, and was considered to be a cat in disguise.
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How stunning are the changes which age makes in a man while he sleeps!
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While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.
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If you want to change the future, you must change what you're doing in the present.
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I am dead to adverbs they cannot excite me. To misplace an adverb is a thing which I am able to do with frozen indifference it can never give me a pang. There are subtleties which I cannot master at all - they confuse me, they mean absolutely nothing to me - and this adverb plague is one of them.
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To be good is noble but to show others how to be good is nobler and no trouble.
Mark Twain
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If you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!
Mark Twain
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If you would beseech a blessing upon yourself, beware! lest without intent you invoke a curse upon a neighbor at the same time.
Mark Twain
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Tell me about a person's family, friends, and community, and I'll tell you what his opinions are.
Mark Twain
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School gets in the way of my learning.
Mark Twain
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[On Dutch flat poetry]: It is too smooth and blubbery it reads like butter-milk gurgling from a jug.
Mark Twain
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Do one thing every day you don't want to do.
Mark Twain
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It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.
Mark Twain
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Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak.
Mark Twain
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English humor is hard to appreciate, though, unless you are trained to it. The English papers, in reporting my speeches, always put 'laughter' in the wrong place.
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