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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.
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
Talk
Obedience
Talking
Fixed
Free
Rate
Ascribing
Science
Intelligence
Disobeying
Kind
Laws
Potentiality
People
Unless
Obeying
Either
Atoms
Law
Nonsense
More quotes by Samuel Butler
Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
Samuel Butler
When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
Samuel Butler
Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
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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.
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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.
Samuel Butler
To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
Samuel Butler
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
Samuel Butler
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.
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
If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?
Samuel Butler
Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.
Samuel Butler
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
Samuel Butler
My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.
Samuel Butler
There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.
Samuel Butler
If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.
Samuel Butler
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
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
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Samuel Butler
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Samuel Butler
Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
Samuel Butler