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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
Bounds
Function
Virtue
Within
Keep
Vice
Reasonable
Vices

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Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
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It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
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Friends are like money, easier made than kept.
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Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
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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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Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
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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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The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.
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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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Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
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The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
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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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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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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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The history of art is the history of revivals.
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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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Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
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The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
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Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
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You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
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