Samuel Butler Quotes
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Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
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The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.
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All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
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God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
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No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
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Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
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It is tact that is golden, not silence.
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In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
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A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.
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When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.
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It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
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My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.
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In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.
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The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
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Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
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We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.
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For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
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Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
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If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
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You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
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Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.
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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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Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
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There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.