Mark Twain Quotes About Character
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When one's character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.
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Praise is well, compliment is well, but affection-that is the last and most precious reward that any man can win, whether by character or achievement.
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One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one.
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Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness... It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.
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There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless.
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It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.
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One must keep one's character. Earn a character first if you can, and if you can't, then assume one. From the code of morals I have been following and revising and revising for 72 years I remember one detail. All my life I have been honest - comparatively honest. I could never use money I had not made honestly - I could only lend it.
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A man's character may be learned from the adjectives which he habitually uses in conversation.
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As I have said before, I never had any large respect for good spelling. That is my feeling yet. Before the spelling-book came with its arbitrary forms, men unconsciously revealed shades of their characters, and also added enlightening shades of expression to what they wrote by their spelling, and so it is possible that the spelling-book has been a doubtful benevolence to us.
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If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
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Surely the test of a novel's characters is that you feel a strong interest in them and their affairs the good to be successful, the bad to suffer failure. Well, in John Ward, you feel no divided interest, no discriminating interest you want them all to land in hell together, and right away.
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there was no crime in unconscious plagiarism; that I committed it everyday, that he committed it everyday, that every man alive on earth who writes or speaks commits it every day and not merely once or twice but every time he open his mouth… there is nothing of our own in it except some slight change born of our temperament, character, environment, teachings and associations
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The test of any good fiction is that you should care something for the characters; the good to succeed, the bad to fail. The trouble with most fiction is that you want them all to land in hell, together, as quickly as possible.
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There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.
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I will now claim - until dispossesed - that I was the first person in the world to apply the typewriter to literature. ... The early machine was full of caprices, full of defects- devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. ... He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.
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What God lacks is convictions- stability of character. He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something- not try to be everything.
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To arrive at a just estimate of a renowned man's character one must judge it by the standards of his time, not ours.
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It is not worth while to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man's character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible.
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