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The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
Samuel Butler
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Samuel Butler
Age: 66 †
Born: 1835
Born: December 4
Died: 1902
Died: June 18
Farmer
Novelist
Painter
Photographer
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Science Fiction Writer
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Notts
Cellarius
Men
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More quotes by Samuel Butler
We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
Samuel Butler
A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.
Samuel Butler
I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.
Samuel Butler
A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
Samuel Butler
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.
Samuel Butler
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
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
Samuel Butler
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Samuel Butler
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.
Samuel Butler
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
Samuel Butler
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.
Samuel Butler
The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.
Samuel Butler
God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
Samuel Butler
Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.
Samuel Butler
Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
Samuel Butler
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
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.
Samuel Butler
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler
How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?
Samuel Butler
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.
Samuel Butler
