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Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things.

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
Good
Wrought
Things
Wisely
World
Refrain
Dreams
Saying
Prayer
Whether
Refrains
Dream
Tennyson

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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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I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.
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People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
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Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.
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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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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.
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The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
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Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.
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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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God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
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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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To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
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If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
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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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Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
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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.
Samuel Butler
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He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.
Samuel Butler
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Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
Samuel Butler
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He dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
Samuel Butler
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Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
Samuel Butler