"The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds."
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Quote collection
Samuel Butler quotes (page 5 of 12)
222 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits."
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"There is no bore like a clever bore."
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"Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits."
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"The course of true anything never does run smooth."
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"And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods."
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"Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man."
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"God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour."
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"Let man be true and every god a liar."
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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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"The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places."
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"The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them."
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"Neither irony or sarcasm is argument."
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"Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such."
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"Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint."
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"For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine."
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"Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime"
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"Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost."
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"If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death."
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"Death is only a larger kind of going abroad."
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