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Customs
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Often, the less there is to justify a traditional custom, the harder it is to get rid of it.
-Mark Twain
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Cynicism
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Out of the unconscious lips of babes and sucklings are we satirized.
-Mark Twain
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I refused to attend his funeral. But I wrote a very nice letter explaining that I approved of it.
-Mark Twain
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Dance, Dancing
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I was exceedingly delighted with the waltz, and also with the polka. These differ in name, but there the difference ceases
-Mark Twain, 1862
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On with dance, let joy be unconfined, is my motto; whether there's any dance to dance or any joy to unconfined.
-Mark Twain
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Death
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The report of my death was an exaggeration.
-Mark Twain, After reading his own obituary, June 2, 1897
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Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born --a hundred million years --and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.
-Mark Twain
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Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race. He brought death into the world.
-Mark Twain
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We owe a deep debt of gratitude to Adam, the first great benefactor of the human race: he brought death into the world.
-Mark Twain
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We never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead -- and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.
-Mark Twain
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Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
-Mark Twain
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All say, How hard it is that we have to die -- a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain
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Deception/Lying
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When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people.
-Mark Twain
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Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live.
-Mark Twain
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One of the most striking differences between a cat and a lie is that a cat has only nine lives.
http://www.twainquotes.com/
-Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson
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A wise man does not waste so good a commodity as lying for naught.
-Mark Twain
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A lie can run around the world six times while the truth is still trying to put on its pants.
-Mark Twain
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I have a higher and grander standard of principle than George Washington. He could not lie; I can, but I won t.
-Mark Twain
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Decisions
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I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it takes me as much as a week, sometimes, to make it up.
-Mark Twain
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Democracy
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I am a democrat only on principle, not by instinct -- nobody is that. Doubtless some people say they are, but this world is grievously given to lying.
-Mark Twain
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Desires
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I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.
-Mark Twain
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Despair
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It is a time when one's spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.
-Mark Twain
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Determination
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Apparently there is nothing that cannot happen today.
-Mark Twain
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Discovery
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What is there that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea, to discover a great thought -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plough had gone over before. To find a new planet, to invent a new hinge, to find a way to make the lightning carry your messages. To be the first -- that is the idea.
-Mark Twain
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Dissent
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The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane.
-Mark Twain
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Books by and about Mark Twain