Samuel Butler Quotes
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Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
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The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
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It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper.
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My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.
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The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
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Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.
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All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
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Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
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Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
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Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.
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Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
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In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
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A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.
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To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
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God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.
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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?"
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If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
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Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
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God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
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Be virtuous and you will be vicious.
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The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
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To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
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Let man be true and every god a liar.
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Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
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A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.
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Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
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God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
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There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.
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One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.
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[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
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