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Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

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
Sense
Tell
Truth
Wells
Lied
Well
Requires
Men
Fool
Wisdom
Lying

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My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.
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Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
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Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
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The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
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Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.
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If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.
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History is a bucket of ashes.
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Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.
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Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
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The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
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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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We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
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The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.
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Let man be true and every god a liar.
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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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There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.
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Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
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Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.
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Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
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If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
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