Samuel Butler Quotes & Sayings

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious. — Samuel Butler

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten? — Samuel Butler

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

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can
it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence. — Samuel Butler

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

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

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it. — Samuel Butler

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

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

Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another. — Samuel Butler

I tell you, Edward, said my father with some severity, we must judge men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough, either in painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency, he has done enough. It is not by what a man has actually put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts by which he has set down, so to speak, upon the canvas of his life that I will judge him, but by what he makes me feel that he felt and aimed at. If he has made me feel that he felt those things to be lovable which I hold lovable myself I ask no more. — Samuel Butler

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers. — Samuel Butler

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

Life is one long process of getting tired. — Samuel Butler

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

There is no bore like a clever bore. — Samuel Butler

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions. — Samuel Butler

did not then foresee how closely my godson's life and mine were in after years to be bound up together; if I had, I should doubtless have looked upon him with different eyes and noted much to which I paid no attention at the time. As it was, I was glad to get away from him, for I could do nothing for him, or chose to say that I could not, and the sight of so much suffering was painful to me. A man should not only have his own way as far as possible, but he should only consort with things that are getting their own way so far that they are at any rate comfortable. Unless — Samuel Butler

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it. — Samuel Butler

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. — Samuel Butler

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

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

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

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue. — Samuel Butler

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's. — Samuel Butler

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

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. — Samuel Butler

There is no permanent absolute unchangeable truth; what we should pursue is the most convenient arrangement of our ideas. — Samuel Butler

In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation. — Samuel Butler

Union may be strength, but it is mere brute strength unless wisely directed. — Samuel Butler

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. — Samuel Butler

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

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

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

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. — Samuel Butler

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. — Samuel Butler

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

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented. — Samuel Butler

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

I have been told lately that Fuseli was travelling by coach and a gentleman opposite him said: "I understand, Mr. Fuseli, that you ... I have been told lately that Fuseli was travelling by coach and a gentleman opposite him said: "I understand, Mr. Fuseli, that you are a painter; it may interest you to know that I have a daughter who paints on velvet."
Fuseli rose instantly and said in a strong foreign accent, "Let me get out. — Samuel Butler

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

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

Theobald had never liked children. He had always got away from them as soon as he could, and so had they from him; oh, why, he was inclined to ask himself, could not children be born into the world grown up? If Christina could have given birth to a few full-grown clergymen in priest's orders - of moderate views, but inclining rather to Evangelicalism, with comfortable livings and in all respects facsimiles of Theobald himself - why, there might have been more sense in it; or if people could buy ready-made children at a shop of whatever age and sex they liked, instead of always having to make them at home and to begin at the beginning with them - that might do better, but as it was he did not like it. He felt as he had felt when he had been required to come and be married to Christina - that he had been going on for a long time quite nicely, and would much rather continue things on their present footing. In — Samuel Butler

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. — Samuel Butler

There are two great rules of life; the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule. — Samuel Butler

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

There was no doubt that Theobald passed peacefully away during his sleep. Can a man who died thus be said to have died at all? He has presented the phenomena of death to other people, but in respect of himself he has not only not died, but has not even thought that he was going to die. This is not more than half dying, but then neither was his life more than half living. He presented so many of the phenomena of living that I suppose on the whole it would be less trouble to think of him as having been alive than as never having been born at all, but — Samuel Butler

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them. — Samuel Butler

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

I suppose in reality not a leaf goes yellow in autumn without ceasing to care about its sap and making the parent tree very uncomfortable by long growling and grumbling - but surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account? — Samuel Butler

God cannot alter the past, though historians can. — Samuel Butler

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

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

I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong. — Samuel Butler

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

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

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

He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still. — Samuel Butler

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa. — Samuel Butler

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

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself. — Samuel Butler

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them. — Samuel Butler

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. — Samuel Butler

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

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. — Samuel Butler

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. — Samuel Butler

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence. — Samuel Butler

The course of true anything never does run smooth. — Samuel Butler

Peter remained on friendly terms with Christ notwithstanding Christ's having healed his mother-in-law. — Samuel Butler

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

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. — Samuel Butler

Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since. — Samuel Butler

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

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

Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it. — Samuel Butler

The practical outcome of the foregoing was a conviction in Theobald's mind, and if in his, then in Christina's, that it was their duty to begin training up their children in the way they should go, even from their earliest infancy. The first signs of self-will must be carefully looked for, and plucked up by the roots at once before they had time to grow. Theobald — Samuel Butler

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

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

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

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

very high standard, again, involves the possession of rare virtues, and rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal. People divide off vice and virtue as though they were two things, neither of which had with it anything of the other. This is not so. There is no useful virtue which has not some alloy of vice, and hardly any vice, if any, which carries not with it a little dash of virtue; virtue and vice are like life and death, or mind and matter - things which cannot exist without being qualified by their opposite. The most — Samuel Butler

The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation. — Samuel Butler

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

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept. — Samuel Butler

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

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

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

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science. — Samuel Butler

The want of money is the root of all evil. — Samuel Butler

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

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

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. — Samuel Butler

Conscience is thoroughly well bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it. — Samuel Butler

The major sin is the sin of being born. — Samuel Butler

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. — Samuel Butler

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

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

We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble
no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape. — Samuel Butler

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

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. — Samuel Butler