Variant: Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.
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“Let us draw the curtain of charity over the rest of this scene”
Source: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.”
Source: Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (2010), p. 210.
Context: For many years I believed that I remembered helping my grandfather drink his whisky toddy when I was six weeks old, but I do not tell about that any more, now; I am grown old, and my memory is not as active as it used to be. When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying, now, and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter. It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it.
“Osteopathy” (1901), in Mark Twain's Speeches, p. 253 http://books.google.com/books?id=jmhaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA253&dq=%22Whose+property+is+my+body%22
Source: Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings
Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
“There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”
Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 1.
Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Context: You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
Source: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Ch. 43.
Source: The Adventures of Huck Finn
Context: So there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and aint't agoing to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand it. I been there before.
“Golf is a good walk spoiled.”
"Twain probably never uttered [these] words," according to R. Kent Rasmussen, editor of The Quotable Mark Twain (1998).
"To play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk" is found in H.S. Scrivener, "Memories of Men and Meetings" https://books.google.com/books?id=cYgCAAAAYAAJ&q=dicta#v=snippet&q=dicta&f=false, in Arthur Wallis Myers (ed.) Lawn Tennis at Home and Abroad New York:Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903, p. 47. Scrivener attributes the aphorism to "my good friends the Allens". Reference from Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/28/golf-good-walk.
Misattributed
“I am not given to exaggeration, and when I say a thing I mean it.”
Mark Twain
book
Roughing It
Source: Roughing It