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Feeling Twain-y

I'm in such a Mark Twain mood tonight. I'm reading some of his writings and he's just so spot on. Not only is he refreshingly eloquent but he also has this air of wit and sarcasm that you just don't come by anymore. I guess my love for Twain originated not in his novels, but in the fact that my childhood crush, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, starred in Huckleberry Finn...that is, until my mom found his picture in my pillow case and taped it in my babybook under "Katie's first love" and teased me incessantly - nevermind, that's not the point. 
Here's my list of top 10 favorite Mark Twain quotes. I love these quotes, maybe you will too.


1. Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear - not absence of fear.
2. It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
3. Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.
4. I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.

5. Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.
6. Love is not a product of reasoning and statistics. It just comes--none knows whence--and cannot explain itself.
7. The proper office of a friend is to side with you when you are in the wrong. Nearly anybody will side with you when you are in the right.
8. It is good to obey all the rules when you're young, so you'll have the strength to break them when you're old.
9. Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.
10. The darling mispronunciations of childhood!--dear me, there's no music that can touch it; and how one grieves when it wastes away and dissolves into correctness, knowing it will never visit his bereaved ear again.

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