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What Is Man? - (1)
I a. Man the Machine. b. Personal Merit The Old Man and the Young Man had been conversing. The Old Man had asserted that the human being is…
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What Is Man? - (2)
O.M. Why, love is that impulse, that law, in its most uncompromising form. It will squander life and everything else on its object. Not pri…
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What Is Man? - (3)
O.M. Very well, then. As I understand it, it isn’t really compassion nor yet duty that moves you to pay the tax, and it isn’t the amount of…
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What Is Man? - (4)
Y.M. Well, yes, that is a difference, it is true. O.M. The difference between straight speaking and crooked; the difference between frankne…
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What Is Man? - (5)
O.M. He observes a smell, he infers a cheese, he seeks and finds. The astronomer observes this and that; adds his this and that to the this…
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What Is Man? - (6)
O.M. The one implies untrammeled power to act as you please, the other implies nothing beyond a mere mental process: the critical ability t…
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What Is Man? - (7)
O.M. Yes, the half-dozen others are modifications of the extremes. But the law is the same. Where the temperament is two-thirds happy, or t…
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The Death Of Jean
The death of Jean Clemens occurred early in the morning of December 24, 1909. Mr. Clemens was in great stress of mind when I first saw him,…
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The Turning-Point Of My Life
I If I understand the idea, the Bazar invites several of us to write upon the above text. It means the change in my life’s course which int…
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How To Make History Dates Stick - (1)
These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the words large enough to command respect. In the hope that you are listening, and…
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How To Make History Dates Stick - (2)
Make him spout his water forward instead of backward; also make him small, and stick a harpoon in him and give him that sick look in the ey…
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The Memorable Assassination
Note.—The assassination of the Empress of Austria at Geneva, September 10, 1898, occurred during Mark Twain’s Austrian residence. The news…
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A Scrap Of Curious History
Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri—a village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains, France—a village; time, the…
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Switzerland, The Cradle Of Liberty
Interlaken, Switzerland, 1891. It is a good many years since I was in Switzerland last. In that remote time there was only one ladder railw…
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At The Shrine Of St.. Wagner - (1)
Bayreuth, Aug. 2d, 1891 It was at Nuremberg that we struck the inundation of music-mad strangers that was rolling down upon Bayreuth. It ha…
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At The Shrine Of St.. Wagner - (2)
A prince is not to us what he is to a European, of course. We have not been taught to regard him as a god, and so one good look at him is l…
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William Dean Howells
Is it true that the sun of a man’s mentality touches noon at forty and then begins to wane toward setting? Doctor Osler is charged with say…
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English As She Is Taught - (1)
In the appendix to Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson one finds this anecdote: Cato’s Soliloquy.—One day Mrs. Gastrel set a little girl to repeat t…
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English As She Is Taught - (2)
We come now to historical matters, historical remains, one might say. As one turns the pages he is impressed with the depth to which one da…
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A Simplified Alphabet
(This article, written during the autumn of 1899, was about the last writing done by Mark Twain on any impersonal subject.) I have had a ki…
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As Concerns Interpreting The Deity
I This line of hieroglyphs was for fourteen years the despair of all the scholars who labored over the mysteries of the Rosetta stone: (Fig…
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Concerning Tobacco
(Written about 1893; not before published) As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. And the chiefest is this—that there is a stan…
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The Bee
It was Maeterlinck who introduced me to the bee. I mean, in the psychical and in the poetical way. I had had a business introduction earlie…
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Taming The Bicycle
(Written about 1893; not before published) In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the old high-wheel bicycles of that peri…
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Is Shakespeare Dead? - (1)
(from My Autobiography) I Scattered here and there through the stacks of unpublished manuscript which constitute this formidable Autobiogra…
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Is Shakespeare Dead? - (2)
The will mentioned not a play, not a poem, not an unfinished literary work, not a scrap of manuscript of any kind. Many poets have died poo…
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Is Shakespeare Dead? - (3)
Now then, I am away along in life—my seventy-third year being already well behind me—yet sixteen of my Hannibal schoolmates are still alive…
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Is Shakespeare Dead? - (4)
This is a charming specimen of Stratfordian argument. There is, as we have seen, a very old tradition that Shakespeare was a butcher’s appr…
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Is Shakespeare Dead? - (5)
The Wisdom Of The Ancients, a work which, if it had proceeded from any other writer, would have been considered as a masterpiece of wit and…
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Is Shakespeare Dead? - (6)
I remember her well. I have a picture of her in my mind which was graven there, clear and sharp and vivid, sixty-three years ago. She was a…