Mark Twain Quotes About Literature
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It makes one hope and believe that a day will come when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whiskey, or any other of the necessaries of life. It grieves me to think how far more profound and reverent a respect the law would have for literature if a body could only get drunk on it.
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Delicacy - a sad, sad false delicacy - robs literature of the two best things among its belongings: Family-circle narratives & obscene stories.
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The Germans have an inhuman way of cutting up their verbs. Now a verb has a hard time enough of it in this world when it's all together. It's downright inhuman to split it up. But that's just what those Germans do. They take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German. from "Disappearance of Literature
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Comedy keeps the heart sweet; but we all know that there is wholesome refreshment for both mind and heart in an occasional climb among the pomps of the intellectual snow-summits built by Shakespeare and those others.
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I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it.
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The more things are forbidden, the more popular they become.
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Literature is well enough, as a time-passer, and for the improvement and general elevation and purification of mankind, but it has no practical value.
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It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress.
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Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
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No man has an appreciation so various that his judgment is good upon all varieties of literary work.
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Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
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Creed and opinion change with time, and their symbols perish; but Literature and its temples are sacred to all creeds and inviolate.
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When people do not respect us we are sharply offended; yet in his private heart no man much respects himself.
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What a wee little part of a person's life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself.
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It was wonderful to find America, but it would have been more wonderful to miss it.
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Jim said that bees won't sting idiots, but I didn't believe that, because I tried them lots of times myself and they wouldn't sting me.
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We Americans... bear the ark of liberties of the world.
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I have made it a rule never to smoke more than one cigar at a time.
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Men think they think upon the great political questions, and they do; but they think with their party, not independently; they read its literature, but not that of the other side
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Let us not be too particular; it is better to have old secondhand diamonds than none at all.
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The public is the only critic whose judgment is worth anything at all.
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Ideally a book would have no order to it, and the reader would have to discover his own.
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The most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop.
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Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
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I told that girl, in the kindest, gentlest way, that I could not consent to deliver judgment upon any one's manuscript, because an individual's verdict was worthless. It might underrate a work of high merit and lose it to the world, or it might overrate a trashy production and so open the way for its infliction upon the world. I said that the great public was the only tribunal competent to sit in judgment upon a literary effort, and therefore it must be best to lay it before that tribunal in the outset, since in the end it must stand or fall by that mighty court's decision any way.
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Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.
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If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers.
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Prosperity is the best protector of principle.
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I have no liking for novels or stories - none in the world; and so, whenever I read one - which is not oftener than once in two years, and even in these same cases I seldom read beyond the middle of the book - my distaste for the vehicle always taints my judgment of the literature itself, as a matter of course; and also of course makes my verdict valuless. Are you saying "You have written stories yourself." Quite true: but the fact that an Indian likes to scalp people is no evidence that he likes to be scalped.
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My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.
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