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Samuel Butler (novelist) Quotes
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Genius... has been defined as a supreme capacity for taking trouble... It might be more fitly described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius remains.
Samuel Butler
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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.
Samuel Butler
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Every one should keep a mental waste-paper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it — torn up to irrecoverable tatters.
Samuel Butler
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We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers.
Samuel Butler
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Every new idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organised beings are.
Samuel Butler
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Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.
Samuel Butler
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There is no drawing the line between physics and metaphysics. If you examine every day facts at all closely, you are a physicist; but if you press your physics at all home, you become a metaphysician; if you press your metaphysics at all home, you are in a fog.
Samuel Butler
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We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
Samuel Butler
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Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.
Samuel Butler
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In mathematics he was greater Than Tycho Brahe or Erra Pater; For he, by geometric scale, Could take the size of pots of ale; Resolve by sines and tangents straight If bread or butter wanted weight; And wisely tell you what hour o' th' day The clock does strike, by algebra.
Samuel Butler
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The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.
Samuel Butler
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It must always be remembered that man's body is what it is through having been molded into its present shape by the chances and changes of an immense time.
Samuel Butler
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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.
Samuel Butler
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As if a man should be dissected, To see what part is disaffected.
Samuel Butler
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This hairy meteor did denounce The fall of Scepters and of Crowns.
Samuel Butler
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A botanist is a person whose aim is to uproot, kill and exterminate every plant that is at all remarkable for rarity or any special virtue, and the rarer it is the more bitterly he will hunt it down.
Samuel Butler
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Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.
Samuel Butler
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And now the lofty telescope, the scale By which they venture Heav'n itself t' assail, Was raised, and planted full against the Moon.
Samuel Butler
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He was in Logick, a great Critick, Profoundly skill'd in Analytick; He could distinguish and divide A hair 'twixt south and south-west side.
Samuel Butler
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To try one desp'rate med'cine more; For where your case can be no worse, The desp'rat is the wisest course.
Samuel Butler
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Atoms have a mind as much smaller and less complex than ours as their bodies are smaller and less complex.
Samuel Butler
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Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.
Samuel Butler
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For error and mistake are infinite, But truth has but one way to be i' th' right.
Samuel Butler
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Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist...
Samuel Butler
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People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
Samuel Butler
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Quote of the day
Now if the harvest is over, And the world cold, Give me the bonus of laughter, As I lose hold.
John Betjeman
Samuel Butler
Creative Commons
Born:
December 4, 1835
Died:
June 18, 1902
(aged 66)
Bio:
Samuel Butler was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh.
Known for:
Erewhon (1872)
The Way of All Flesh
Erewhon Revisited (1901)
The fair haven
Life and habit
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Samuel Butler (poet)
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