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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
Morality
Stagnation
Absolutes
Absolute
Ethics

More quotes by Samuel Butler

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You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
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There are two great rules of life the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule.
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Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.
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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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A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
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He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.
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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.
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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.
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Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
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The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.
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A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
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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.
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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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Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
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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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[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
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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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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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Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
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The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Samuel Butler