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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Originally appeared in MacLaren, Gay (1938). "I Meet Mark Twain". Morally We Roll Along. Little, Brown and Company. p. 66. ASIN B00085LQDW.
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The book is a memoir and the quote is MacLaren recalling something Twain supposedly said to her when she was a little girl. There's no reason to doubt that this is an honest memoir, that MacLaren met Twain, and that he said something encouraging to her. It seems a stretch though to trust MacLaren's memory of something said to her decades earlier when she was just a girl enough to take her quotation marks literally. This quotation's status as an actual verbatim quote from Mark Twain seems dubious.Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain)
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Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (Mark Twain)
Clement of Alexandria
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