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...I was born lazy. I am no lazier now than I was forty years ago, but that is because I reached the limit forty years ago. You can't go beyond possibility.
Mark Twain -
It is easier to stay out than get out.
Mark Twain
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It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
Mark Twain -
...it seems to be a law of the human constitution that those that deserve shall not have, and those that do not deserve shall get everything that is worth having. It is a sufficiently crazy arrangement, it seems to me.
Mark Twain -
Customs do not concern themselves with right or wrong or reason. But they have to be obeyed; one reasons all around them until he is tired, but he must not transgress them, it is sternly forbidden.
Mark Twain -
We are all alike, on the inside.
Mark Twain -
It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us - dreamers and indolent... It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich - these are wholesome; but to begin it prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.
Mark Twain -
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
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.
Mark Twain -
Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we.'
Mark Twain -
The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey.
Mark Twain -
We are always anxious to be distinguished for a talent which we do not possess than to be praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
Mark Twain -
The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out the conservative adopts them.
Mark Twain -
...when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are. Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least.
Mark Twain
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Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
Mark Twain -
I can live for two months on a good compliment.
Mark Twain -
When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.
Mark Twain -
In the cotton States, after the war...the Jew came down in force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the negro's wants on credit, and at the end of the season was proprietor of the negro's share of the present crop and of part of his share of the next one. Before long, the whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtful if the negro loved him.
Mark Twain -
Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.
Mark Twain -
Before taking final leave of me, my instructor inquired concerning my physical strength, and I was able to inform him that I hadn't any.
Mark Twain
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What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
Mark Twain -
I don't like to commit myself about heaven and hell - you see, I have friends in both places.
Mark Twain -
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.
Mark Twain -
To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.
Mark Twain