Samuel Butler quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Samuel Butler on Wise Famous Quotes.

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.

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

It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.

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

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears
but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.

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.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

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.

There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.

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.

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.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

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

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

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.

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

To live is like to love
all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

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

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

The major sin is the sin of being born.

Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.

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

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.

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.

Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

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

If I had shown half as many dangerous tendencies when I was a boy, my father would have apprenticed me to a greengrocer, of that I'm very sure,

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.

Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate.

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

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

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

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.

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

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

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

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

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.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds

Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded.

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

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

The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.

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

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

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

Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

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.

Friends are like money, easier made than kept.

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

Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.

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

Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

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

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

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 function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Peter remained on friendly terms with Christ notwithstanding Christ's having healed his mother-in-law.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

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

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

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 as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

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

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.

History is a bucket of ashes.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

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

Let every man be true and every god a liar.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

For as whipp'd tops and bandied balls,
The learned hold, are animals;
So horses they affirm to be
Mere engines made by geometry

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

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.