Samuel Butler Quotes
Top 100 wise famous quotes and sayings by Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler Famous Quotes & Sayings
Discover top inspirational quotes from Samuel Butler on Wise Famous Quotes.
There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.
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.
The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears
but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.
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.
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.
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
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.
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
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.
The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
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.
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,
To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
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.
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.
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?
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.
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.
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
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.
Peter remained on friendly terms with Christ notwithstanding Christ's having healed his mother-in-law.
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.
I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.
Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.