The Best of Mark Twain

THE GILDED AGE, by Twain and Warner [MT#39][mtgld10.txt]3178

Accidental murder resulting from justifiable insanity
Always trying to build a house by beginning at the top
Appropriation
Beautiful credit! The foundation of modern society
Believed it; because she desired to believe it
Best intentions and the frailest resolution
Big babies with beards
Cheap sentiment and high and mighty dialogue
Conscious superiority
Does your doctor know any thing
Enjoy icebergs–as scenery but not as company
Erie RR: causeway of cracked rails and cows, to the West
Fever of speculation
Final resort of the disappointed of her sex, the lecture platform
Geographical habits
Get away and find a place where he could despise himself
Gossips were soon at work
Grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless
Grief that is too deep to find help in moan or groan or outcry
Haughty humility
Having no factitious weight of dignity to carry
Imagination to help his memory
Invariably advised to settle–no matter how, but settle
Invariably allowed a half for shrinkage in his statements
Is this your first visit?
It had cost something to upholster these women
Large amount of money necessary to make a small hole
Later years brought their disenchanting wisdom
Let me take your grief and help you carry it
Life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death
Mail train which has never run over a cow
Meant no harm they only wanted to know
Money is most difficult to get when people need it most
Never sewed when she could avoid it. Bless her!
Nursed his woe and exalted it
Predominance of the imagination over the judgment
Question was asked and answered–in their eyes
Riches enough to be able to gratify reasonable desires
Road, which did not seem to know its own mind exactly
Sarcasms of fate
Sleep that heals all heart-aches and ends all sorrows
Small gossip stood a very poor chance
Sun bothers along over the Atlantic
Think a Congress of ours could convict the devil of anything
Titles never die in America
Too much grace and too little wine
Understood the virtues of “addition, division and silence”
Unlimited reliance upon human promises
Very pleasant man if you were not in his way
Wasn’t worth a cent two years ago, and now I owe two millions
“We must create, a public opinion,” said Senator Dilworthy
We’ll make you think you never was at home before
We’ve all got to come to it at last, anyway!
Widened, and deepened, and straightened–(Public river Project)
Wished that she could see his sufferings now
Your absence when you are present

THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT, by Mark Twain [MT#40][mtacl10.txt]3179

He’s a kind of an aristocrat, his father being a doctor, and you know
what style that is–in England, I mean, because in this country a doctor
ain’t so very much, even if he’s that.

Hasn’t any culture but the artificial culture of books, which adorns but
doesn’t really educate.

A discriminating irreverence is the creator and protector of human
liberty.

The exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life.

Oh, just to work–that is life! No matter what the work is–that’s of no
consequence. Just work itself is bliss when a man’s been starving for
it.

What right has Goethe, what right has Arnold, what right has any
dictionary, to define the word Irreverence for me? What their ideals are
is nothing to me. So long as I reverence my own ideals my whole duty is
done, and I commit no profanation if I laugh at theirs. I may scoff at
other people’s ideals as much as I want to. It is my right and my
privilege. No man has any right to deny it.

No throne was ever set up by the unhampered vote of a majority of any
nation; and that hence no throne exists that has a right to exist, and no
symbol of it, flying from any flagstaff, is righteously entitled to wear
any device but the skull and crossbones of that kindred industry which
differs from royalty only business-wise–merely as retail differs from
wholesale.

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