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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
Often
Tell
Writing
Hence
Years
Guide
Men
Guides
Hundred
Doubt
Asks

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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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Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
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There is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
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Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us.
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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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Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
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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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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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A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
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The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into 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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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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An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.
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To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.
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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? And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.
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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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Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
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The course of true anything never does run smooth.
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When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
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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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