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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.

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
Lifetime
Failure
Single
Supportable
Challenges
Equanimity
Great
Arrived
Men
Adversity
People
Prosperity
Degrees

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Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.
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Life is one long process of getting tired.
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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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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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Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
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How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?
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If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
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The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.
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Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
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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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Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.
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A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.
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Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
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When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.
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People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
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Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
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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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Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
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Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
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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.
Samuel Butler