"By trying we can easily learn to endure adversity. Another man's, I mean."

Twain, Mark on Adversity
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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."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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"Why is it that we rejoice at birth and grieve at a funeral? It is because we are not the person involved."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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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."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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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."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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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."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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"Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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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."

Twain, Mark on Death and Dying
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"When a person cannot deceive himself the chances are against his being able to deceive other people."

Twain, Mark on Deception
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"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

Twain, Mark on Deception
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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."

Twain, Mark on Democracy
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"Denial ain't just a river in Egypt."

Twain, Mark on Denial
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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."

Twain, Mark on Desire
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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."

Twain, Mark on Despair
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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."

Twain, Mark on Discovery
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"The rule is perfect: in all matters of opinion our adversaries are insane."

Twain, Mark on Dissent
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"He has been a doctor a year now and has had two patients, no, three, I think -- yes, it was three; I attended their funerals."

Twain, Mark on Doctors
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"Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul."

Twain, Mark on Dress
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"Duties are not performed for duty's sake, but because their neglect would make the man uncomfortable. A man performs but one duty --the duty of contenting his spirit, the duty of making himself agreeable to himself."

Twain, Mark on Duty
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"Do something every day that you don't want to do. This is the golden rule for acquiring the habit of doing your duty without pain."

Twain, Mark on Duty
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"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education."

Twain, Mark on Education
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"Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run. Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education."

Twain, Mark on Education
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"We must annex those people. We can afflict them with our wise and beneficent government. We can introduce the novelty of thieves, all the way up from street-car pickpockets to municipal robbers and Government defaulters, and show them how amusing it is to arrest them and try them and then turn them loose -- some for cash and some for political influence. We can make them ashamed of their simple and primitive justice. We can make that little bunch of sleepy islands the hottest corner on earth, and array it in the moral splendor of our high and holy civilization. Annexation is what the poor islanders need. Shall we to men benighted, the lamp of life deny?"

Twain, Mark on Empire
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"The first half of life consists of the capacity to enjoy without the chance; the last half consists of the chance without the capacity."

Twain, Mark on Enjoyment
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"Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied."

Twain, Mark on Envy
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