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Directory of Mark Twain's maxims, quotations, and various opinions:

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INSTINCT

If you should rear a duck in the heart of the Sahara, no doubt it would swim if you brought it to the Nile.
- The Gilded Age

Mallard
Photo of mallard duck by Dave Thomson, 2005.

...it shows that for all the brag you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of it for real unerringness.
- Tom Sawyer Abroad

Now my idea of the meaningless term "instinct" is, that it is merely petrified thought; solidified and made inanimate by habit; thought which was once alive and awake but it become unconscious--walks in its sleep, so to speak.
- What Is Man?

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