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When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

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
Asks
Often
Tell
Writing
Hence
Years
Guide
Men
Guides
Hundred
Doubt

More quotes by Samuel Butler

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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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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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Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
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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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The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
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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 definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
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People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
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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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Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.
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God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
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Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
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Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.
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God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
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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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Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.
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Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
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People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
Samuel Butler
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If I die prematurely at any rate I shall be saved from being bored to death by my own success.
Samuel Butler
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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.
Samuel Butler