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

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ACADEMIC JARGON

"As concerns this question, our inspired Founder instructs us that the fealty due from the Ultimate in connection with and subjection to the intermediate and the inferential, these being of necessity subordinate to the Auto-Isothermal, and limited subliminally by this contact, which is in all cases sporadic and incandescent, those that ascend to the Abode of the Blest are assimilated in thought and action by the objective influence of the truth which sets us free, otherwise they could not." .....It was just a snow-flurry on a warm day: every flake was distinct and perfect, but they melted before you could grab enough to make a ball out of them.
- "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes"

AI image created by Barbara Schmidt

We have natural & justifiable distrust of talky men who make a sounding & ostentatious pretense of saying a thing & yet don’t say it after all -- men who hide a mustard-seed of an idea in a kaleidoscope of words, so that the more you turn the thing the more you can’t quite capture that elusive little idea, because it always takes refuge, just in time, behind a new & bewitching rainbow-explosion of fine language ...
- letter to unidentified friend, written between 24 – 30 September 1876; published in Hartford Courant 2 October 1876


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