Quote

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
Doubt
Asks
Often
Tell
Writing
Hence
Years
Guide
Men
Guides
Hundred

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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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Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
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Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
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Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
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The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
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Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
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Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
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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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Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.
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If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
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Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
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If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
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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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How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?
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The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
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Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.
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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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Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.
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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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