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

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HEROES

To be human is to have one's little modicum of romance secreted away in one's composition. One never ceases to make a hero of one's self in private.
- The Gilded Age

We find not much in ourselves to admire, we are always privately wanting to be like somebody else. If everybody was satisfied with himself there would be no heroes.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography

We admire them, we envy them, for great qualities which we ourselves lack. Hero worship consists in just that.
- Mark Twain's Autobiography


AI image created by R. Kent Rasmussen

One can be a hero to other folk, and in a sort of vague way understand it, or at least believe it, but that a person can really be a hero to a near and familiar friend is a thing which no hero has ever yet been able to realize, I am sure.
-Mark Twain's Autobiography

Heroine: girl in a book who is saved from drowning by a hero and marries him next week, but if it was to be over again ten years later it is likely she would rather have a life-belt and he would rather have her have it.
Hero: person in a book who does things which he can't and girl marries him for it.
- More Maxims of Mark, Johnson, 1927

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