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Samuel Butler Quotes

We’ve collected the best Samuel Butler Quotes. Use them as an inspiration.

1
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.
Samuel Butler
2
Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.
Samuel Butler
3
There is no bore like a clever bore.
Samuel Butler
4
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
Samuel Butler
5
When you‘ve told someone that you’ve left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
Samuel Butler
6
Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.
Samuel Butler
7
In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
Samuel Butler
8
The history of art is the history of revivals.
Samuel Butler
9
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
Samuel Butler
10
Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
Samuel Butler
11
Let every man be true and every god a liar.
Samuel Butler
12
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
Samuel Butler
13
The want of money is the root of all evil.
Samuel Butler
14
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
15
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.
Samuel Butler
16
It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
Samuel Butler
17
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
18
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
Samuel Butler
19
There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.
Samuel Butler
20
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
Samuel Butler
21
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler
22
It is seldom very hard to do one’s duty when one knows what it is, but it is often exceedingly difficult to find this out.
Samuel Butler
23
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.
Samuel Butler
24
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author‘s own life into them.
Samuel Butler
25
All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
26
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
27
The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
Samuel Butler
28
The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
29
To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.
Samuel Butler
30
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
Samuel Butler
31
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
Samuel Butler
32
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
Samuel Butler
33
Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.
Samuel Butler
34
From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
Samuel Butler
35
Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
Samuel Butler
36
There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.
Samuel Butler
37
Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.
Samuel Butler
38
Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
Samuel Butler
39
Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
Samuel Butler
40
God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.
Samuel Butler
41
Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.
Samuel Butler
42
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.
Samuel Butler
43
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
Samuel Butler
44
The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
Samuel Butler
45
The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.
Samuel Butler
46
He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.
Samuel Butler
47
Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.
Samuel Butler
48
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
Samuel Butler
49
We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
Samuel Butler
50
And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
Samuel Butler
51
The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.
Samuel Butler
52
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.
Samuel Butler
53
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
Samuel Butler
54
A physician‘s physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric’s divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.
Samuel Butler
55
Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Samuel Butler
56
My main wish is to get my books into other people’s rooms, and to keep other people’s books out of mine.
Samuel Butler
57
He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.
Samuel Butler
58
Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
Samuel Butler
59
Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
Samuel Butler
60
They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, ‘Can he name a kitten?’
Samuel Butler
61
It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
Samuel Butler
62
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
Samuel Butler
63
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Samuel Butler
64
I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.
Samuel Butler
65
Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
66
Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers.
Samuel Butler
67
A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
Samuel Butler
68
Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
Samuel Butler
69
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
Samuel Butler
70
Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
Samuel Butler
71
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
Samuel Butler
72
If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.
Samuel Butler
73
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.
Samuel Butler
74
Be virtuous and you will be vicious.
Samuel Butler
75
The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
Samuel Butler
76
The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
Samuel Butler
77
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it, you are lost.
Samuel Butler
78
Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.
Samuel Butler
79
Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
Samuel Butler
80
Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.
Samuel Butler
81
Life is one long process of getting tired.
Samuel Butler
82
I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.
Samuel Butler
83
If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
Samuel Butler
84
The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.
Samuel Butler
85
Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
Samuel Butler
86
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
Samuel Butler
87
There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.
Samuel Butler
88
Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
Samuel Butler