Samuel Butler Quotes

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

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

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

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

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

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

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

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

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.

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

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

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.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

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.

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

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.

When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

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

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

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

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

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

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.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

If I die prematurely at any rate I shall be saved from being bored to death by my own success.

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

There is no bore like a clever bore.

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.

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 function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

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

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.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.