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The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.

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
Stagnation
Absolutes
Absolute
Ethics
Morality

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Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
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It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.
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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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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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People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
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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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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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The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
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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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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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In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
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Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
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The history of art is the history of revivals.
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Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
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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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God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
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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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If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
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Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
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The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
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