Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyerand its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the latter often called "The Great American Novel"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth30 November 1835
CountryUnited States of America
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My books are water; those of great geniuses are wine everybody drinks water
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A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razor strap. A thin book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.
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A classic is a book which people praise and don't read.
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Four years at West Point and plenty of books and schooling will learn a man a great deal, It won't learn him the river.
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When I am king, they shall not have bread and shelter only, but also teachings out of books, for a full belly is little worth where the mind is starved
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I have studied it often, but I never could discover the plot
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Great books are weighed and measured by their style and matter and not by the trimmings and shadings of their grammer
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If He Tom Sawyer had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
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Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it.
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Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.
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When I was a boy on the Mississippi River there was a proposition in a township there to discontinue public schools because they were too expensive. An old farmer spoke up and said if they stopped building the schools they would not save anything, because every time a school was closed a jail had to be built.
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When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years.
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We have no permanent brains until we are forty. Then they begin to harden, presently they petrify, then business begins. Since forty I have been regular about going to bed and getting up -- and that is one of the main things.
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We have nine children now half boys and half girls.