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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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GRIEF

Twain by Karl Godwin
Illustration from THE AMERICAN WEEKLY,
May 15, 1949
by Karl Godwin

It is one of the mysteries of our nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live. There is but one reasonable explanation of it. The intellect is stunned by the shock and but gropingly gathers the meaning of the words. The power to realize their full import is mercifully lacking.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography (on Suzy Clemen's death)

The dreamer's valuation of a thing lost--not another man's--is the only standard to measure it by, and his grief for it makes it large and great and fine, and is worthy of our reverence in all cases.
- "My Boyhood Dreams"

Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.
- Which Was the Dream?


The size of a misfortune is not determinable by an outsider's measurement of it but only by the measurements applied to it by the person specially affected by it. The king's lost crown is a vast matter to the king but of no consequence to the child. The lost toy is a great matter to the child but in the king's eyes it is not a thing to break the heart about.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

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