Top 111 Samuel Butler Quotes

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

The history of art is the history of revivals.

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.

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.

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

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

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

From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.

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

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.

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

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

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

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.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

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

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

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

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

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

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

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

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

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

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.

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.

It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy – but he who has shown the better temper.

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

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

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

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

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

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

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

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

Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

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

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

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

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

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

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

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

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage – but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

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

There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

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

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.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

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

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

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

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

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

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

Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.

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

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.

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

Let every man be true and every god a liar.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

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

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.

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

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

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

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.

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.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

My main wish is to get my books into other people’s rooms, and to keep other people’s books out of mine.

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

Man is God’s highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

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.

The want of money is the root of all evil.

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.

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

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

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

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

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

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

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

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

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

Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.

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

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

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

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

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

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

There is no bore like a clever bore.

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.

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.

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.

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

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