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
Writing
Hence
Years
Guide
Men
Guides
Hundred
Doubt
Asks
Often
Tell

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Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
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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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The course of true anything never does run smooth.
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We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
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A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
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A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
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Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.
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God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
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The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
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Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.
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A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
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Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person its importance not being fully recognized for some time.
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Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
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If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.
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It is tact that is golden, not silence.
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If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?
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Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.
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The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
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He dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
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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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