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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

More quotes by Samuel Butler

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History is a bucket of ashes.
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There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing.
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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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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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Priests are not men of the world it is not intended that they should be and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.
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You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
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The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.
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Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
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If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
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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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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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He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.
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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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A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
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The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
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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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The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
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Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
Samuel Butler
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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.
Samuel Butler
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Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game as true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.
Samuel Butler