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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.

Samuel Butler

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Samuel Butler
Age: 66 †
Born: 1835
Born: December 4
Died: 1902
Died: June 18
Farmer
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Translator
Writer
Notts
Cellarius
Gains
Scores
Anger
Disputes
Point
Controversy
Better
Exact
Shown
Temper
Score
Debate
Dispute

More quotes by Samuel Butler

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The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.
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Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
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The course of true anything never does run smooth.
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The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
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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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An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
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Nature. As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature's most interesting productions-the works of man. Nature is usually taken to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it interests me much less than the other half.
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Priests are not men of the world it is not intended that they should be and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.
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A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.
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God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
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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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The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
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Business should be like religion and science it should know neither love nor hate.
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If I die prematurely at any rate I shall be saved from being bored to death by my own success.
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Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.
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Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
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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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Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
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He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.
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Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game as true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.
Samuel Butler