Samuel Butler Quotes

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.

It is not sufficiently considered in the hour of exultation, that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion to what other accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have been allowed him.

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.

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

An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.

The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.

He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.

People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

History is a bucket of ashes.

There is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.

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.

If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.

If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?

You cannot have a thing "matter" by itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing "motion" by itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have both or neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving.

There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; as true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

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.

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.

A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the main aim of his life.

Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.

Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

The course of true anything never does run smooth.

He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.

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

Science is being daily more and more personified and anthromorphized into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, &c.; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate.

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.

Nature. As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature's most interesting productions-the works of man. Nature is usually taken to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it interests me much less than the other half.

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

He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.

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.

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.

We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?

They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

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

Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

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.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it - and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.