The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter, 'tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.
MT
Mark TwainLetter to George Bainton (October 15, 1888)
About Mark Twain
American humorist and novelist, author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (1835-1910)
More from Mark Twain
- Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), ch. 12
- Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest.Note to the Young People's Society, Greenpoint Presbyterian Church, Brooklyn (February 16, 1901)
- Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs one step at a time.Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), ch. 6
- Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.Following the Equator (1897), ch. 15
- Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.Interview by Rudyard Kipling, From Sea to Sea (1899)
- Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.Mark Twain's notebook (1904)
More quotes on communication
- The secret of being a bore is to tell everything.Voltaire
- Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.Bertrand Russell
- People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.Blaise Pascal
- The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.Blaise Pascal
- I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.Blaise Pascal
- Criticize by category, praise by name.Warren Buffett
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