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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

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Opinions have vested interests just as men have.
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Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
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Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
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Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
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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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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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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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The course of true anything never does run smooth.
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Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.
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God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
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A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
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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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Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
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He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.
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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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Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
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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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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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Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.
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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.
Samuel Butler