Quote

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.

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
Take
Seriously
Children
Atheism
Men
Comfort
Prayer
Religion
Use
Easy
Dolls
Without
Prayers

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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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The course of true anything never does run smooth.
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Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
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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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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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Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
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Business should be like religion and science it should know neither love nor hate.
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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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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.
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Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
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If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
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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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It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper.
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Letters are like wine if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
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Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
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Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
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Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
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There is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.
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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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Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
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