Samuel Butler Quotes
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We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
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When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.
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Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.
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A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
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The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
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They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.
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He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.
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The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.
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The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.
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I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.
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The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
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People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
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Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.
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He dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
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Friends are like money, easier made than kept.
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Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
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The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
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If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.
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I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.
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A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the main aim of his life.
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In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.
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Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both
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The course of true anything never does run smooth.
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Spare the rod and spoil the child.
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The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period.
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Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.
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How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?
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The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.
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There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.
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Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us.
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