Samuel Butler Quotes
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Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
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It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
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Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.
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Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.
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There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
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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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Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
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An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
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There is no bore like a clever bore.
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I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.
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The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
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Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
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Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.
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Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
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Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
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There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.
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The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.
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Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.
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God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
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There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
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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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A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
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Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.
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I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.