Top 99 Samuel Butler Quotes

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.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

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.

Logic is like the sword – those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.

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.

If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.

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.

God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers.

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

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.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, ‘Can he name a kitten?’

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

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.

The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.

Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.

Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

There is no bore like a clever bore.

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.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

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.

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author’s own life into them.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

A lawyer’s dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

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.

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.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

The want of money is the root of all evil.

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.

Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

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.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

The advantage of doing one’s praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.