Quote

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.

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
First
Wants
Great
Particular
Trying
Less
Every
Everyone
Tries
Life
Individual
Exception
Two
Rule
Ends
Rules
Firsts
General

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Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
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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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He dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
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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 oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
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Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
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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.
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Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
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The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.
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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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How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?
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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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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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The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
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If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
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The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too 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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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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You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
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I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.
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