Top 100 Samuel Butler Quotes
#1. If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
Samuel Butler
#2. To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
Samuel Butler
#3. It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
Samuel Butler
#4. The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
Samuel Butler
#5. The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
Samuel Butler
#6. I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.
Samuel Butler
#7. There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.
Samuel Butler
#8. Theist and atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
Samuel Butler
#9. Logic is like the sword
those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
Samuel Butler
#11. Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.
Samuel Butler
#12. I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.
Samuel Butler
#13. 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
#14. There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
Samuel Butler
#15. To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.
Samuel Butler
#17. A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Samuel Butler
#18. In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
Samuel Butler
#19. Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler
#20. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
Samuel Butler
#21. 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
#22. All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income
Samuel Butler
#23. For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
Samuel Butler
#25. Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.
Samuel Butler
#26. The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
Samuel Butler
#27. Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both
Samuel Butler
#28. He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.
Samuel Butler
#30. There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.
Samuel Butler
#31. The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
Samuel Butler
#32. The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition.
Samuel Butler
#33. [P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
Samuel Butler
#34. Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
Samuel Butler
#35. And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
Samuel Butler
#36. We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
Samuel Butler
#37. God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
Samuel Butler
#39. An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
Samuel Butler
#40. 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
#41. His knowledge was not far behind
The knight's, but of another kind,
And he another way came by't ;
Some call it Gifts, and some New Light.
A lib'ral art, that costs no pains
Of study, industry, or brains.
Samuel Butler
#42. Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.
Samuel Butler
#43. This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar - he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge.
Samuel Butler
#44. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.
Samuel Butler
#45. Opinions have vested interests just as men have.
Samuel Butler
#46. 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
#47. There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.
Samuel Butler
#48. Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.
Samuel Butler
#49. 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.
Samuel Butler
#50. The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.
Samuel Butler
#51. The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
Samuel Butler
#52. Peter remained on friendly terms with Christ notwithstanding Christ's having healed his mother-in-law.
Samuel Butler
#53. From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
Samuel Butler
#55. There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
Samuel Butler
#56. The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
Samuel Butler
#57. Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
Samuel Butler
#58. Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
Samuel Butler
#59. Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
Samuel Butler
#60. 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
#61. 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.
Samuel Butler
#62. Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.
Samuel Butler
#63. Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.
Samuel Butler
#64. Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.
Samuel Butler
#65. Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognized for some time.
Samuel Butler
#66. 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
#67. The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.
Samuel Butler
#68. Friends are like money, easier made than kept.
Samuel Butler
#69. In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.
Samuel Butler
#70. 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.
Samuel Butler
#71. Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us.
Samuel Butler
#72. Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.
Samuel Butler
#74. A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
Samuel Butler
#75. The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.
Samuel Butler
#76. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.
Samuel Butler
#77. 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.
Samuel Butler
#78. It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.
Samuel Butler
#80. Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.
Samuel Butler
#81. My boy," returned my father, "you must not judge by the work, but by the work in connection with the surroundings. Could Giotto or Filippo Lippi, think you, have got a picture into the Exhibition? Would
Samuel Butler
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
Samuel Butler
#85. A credulous mind ... finds most delight in believing
strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass
with him; but never regards those that are plain and
feasible, for every man can believe such.
Samuel Butler
#86. 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.
Samuel Butler
#87. The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
Samuel Butler
#88. A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
Samuel Butler
#89. 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
#90. The greatest 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
#92. The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
Samuel Butler
#93. 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.
Samuel Butler
#94. 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
#95. To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.
Samuel Butler
#96. The history of art is the history of revivals.
Samuel Butler
#97. Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.
Samuel Butler
#98. They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?
Samuel Butler
#99. Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
Samuel Butler
#100. The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.
Samuel Butler
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