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
answer cast colon iron rules
Cast iron rules will not answer what is one man's colon is another man's comma
age age-and-aging dark insanity knew misfortune
(Twain on Cain): it was his misfortune to live in a dark age that knew not the beneficent Insanity Plea
divide full joy love scholars-and-scholarship value
To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
history looks older together twice
Varanasi" is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together
gets heaps moralist political questions trouble
Yes, you are right - I am a moralist in disguise; it gets me into heaps of trouble when I go thrashing around in political questions
action anybody cheap compared pleasure pleasures tame trivial
To do something, say something, see something, before anybody else - these are things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are tame and commonplace, other cheap and trivial
depend focus imagination judgment
You can't depend on your judgment when your imagination is out of focus
century ghosts great half
Boy, can't you feel the ghosts of a century and a half of great thinkers, especially Twain?
biography buttons cannot clothes himself man written
Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of a man - the biography of the man himself cannot be written
advice worst
Be Yourself is about the worst advice you can give to people.
example few good harder
Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.
few minutes saved sermon sinners twenty
Few sinners are saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon
believing faith
Faith is believing what you know ain't so.
belief believes delightful distort facts man please
Facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful - Get your facts first, and - then you can distort 'em as much as you please