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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.
Samuel Butler -
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.
Samuel Butler
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There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
Samuel Butler -
Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
Samuel Butler -
Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
Samuel Butler -
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Samuel Butler -
I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.
Samuel Butler -
There is no bore like a clever bore.
Samuel Butler
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Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Samuel Butler -
Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
Samuel Butler -
Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
Samuel Butler -
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
Samuel Butler -
All truth is not to be told at all times.
Samuel Butler -
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
Samuel Butler
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There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.
Samuel Butler -
God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
Samuel Butler -
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
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 -
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.
Samuel Butler -
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
Samuel Butler
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The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
Samuel Butler -
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.
Samuel Butler -
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.
Samuel Butler -
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
Samuel Butler