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The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

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
Vice
Reasonable
Vices
Bounds
Function
Virtue
Within
Keep

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Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.
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Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
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The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
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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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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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Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.
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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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Letters are like wine if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
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The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
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There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.
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A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
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The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
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The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.
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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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Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.
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Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
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A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
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There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing.
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The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
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