Top 100 Samuel Butler Quotes
#1. Why does Samuel Butler say, 'Wise men never say what they think of women'? Wise men never say anything else apparently.
Virginia Woolf
#2. Life, said Samuel Butler, is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument - that, friends, is real wisdom.
Saul Bellow
#3. Tobacco ... is not prohibited in the Scriptures, though, as Samuel Butler points out, St. Paul would no doubt have denounced it if he had known of it.
Bertrand Russell
#4. Samuel Butler (1835-1902) said, "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." 7
Adele Von Rust McCormick
#5. But, as our friend Samuel Butler says, he that is stupid in little will also be stupid in much.
Christopher Morley
#6. He [Samuel Butler] made a practise of doing the forks last when washing up, on the grounds that he might die before he got to them. This is very much his principle of 'eating the grapes downwards', so that however many grapes you have eaten the next is always the best of the remainder.
Philip Larkin
#7. If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
Samuel Butler
#8. To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
Samuel Butler
#9. 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
#10. There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing.
Samuel Butler
#11. The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
Samuel Butler
#12. The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
Samuel Butler
#13. For the author there is nothing but his pen, till that and life are worn to the stump: and then, with good fortune, perhaps on his death-bed he receives a pension and equals, it may be, for a few months, the income of a retired butler!
Samuel Laman Blanchard
#14. Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
Samuel Butler
#15. All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
Samuel Butler
#16. The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Samuel Butler
#17. 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
#18. I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.
Samuel Butler
#19. There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas.
Samuel Butler
#20. Theist and atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
Samuel Butler
#21. There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.
Samuel Butler
#22. In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.
Samuel Butler
#23. Logic is like the sword
those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
Samuel Butler
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper.
Samuel Butler
#28. 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
#29. The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
Samuel Butler
#30. If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.
Samuel Butler
#31. There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
Samuel Butler
#32. The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.
Samuel Butler
#33. To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.
Samuel Butler
#35. A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
Samuel Butler
#36. He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.
Samuel Butler
#37. In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
Samuel Butler
#38. There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.
Samuel Butler
#39. If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?
Samuel Butler
#40. Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
Samuel Butler
#41. Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler
#42. The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.
Samuel Butler
#43. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
Samuel Butler
#44. What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.
Samuel Butler
#45. 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
#46. All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income
Samuel Butler
#47. For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
Samuel Butler
#49. 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
#50. The flesh of animals who feed excursively is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks?
Samuel Butler
#52. Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
Samuel Butler
#53. This world is like Noah's Ark.
In which few men but many beasts embark.
Samuel Butler
#54. The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
Samuel Butler
#56. If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
Samuel Butler
#58. Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both
Samuel Butler
#59. 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
#60. Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.
Samuel Butler
#62. 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,
Samuel Butler
#63. How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?
Samuel Butler
#65. 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
#66. He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.
Samuel Butler
#67. People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
Samuel Butler
#69. Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded.
Samuel Butler
#70. I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that he did not set much store by it nor wish to encourage it.
Samuel Butler
#71. He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.
Samuel Butler
#72. 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
#73. The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.
Samuel Butler
#74. The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition.
Samuel Butler
#75. [P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
Samuel Butler
#76. The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
Samuel Butler
#77. Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
Samuel Butler
#78. If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
Samuel Butler
#79. Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate.
Samuel Butler
#81. And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
Samuel Butler
#82. 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
#83. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.
Samuel Butler
#84. God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
Samuel Butler
#85. Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
#86. We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.
Samuel Butler
#87. 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
#88. There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.
Samuel Butler
#90. 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
#91. Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
Samuel Butler
#92. Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.
Samuel Butler
#93. The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
Samuel Butler
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.
Samuel Butler
#97. The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
Samuel Butler
#98. Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.
Samuel Butler
#99. 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
#100. Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
Samuel Butler
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