"Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers."
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Quote collection
Samuel Butler quotes (page 8 of 12)
222 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is."
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"And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science."
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"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."
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"Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things."
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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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"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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"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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"Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons."
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"Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?"
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"Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental."
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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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"A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the main aim of his life."
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"They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot."
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"Life is not an exact science, it is an art."
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"Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously."
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"I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I have loved."
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"The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered."
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"I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry."
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"The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money."
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