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

"Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on."
— Samuel Butler

""All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it." "
— Samuel Butler

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

"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."
— Samuel Butler

"All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income"
— Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh)

"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

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

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

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

"All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it."
— Samuel Butler

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

"Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it."
— Samuel Butler

"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg."
— Samuel Butler

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

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

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

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

"Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing."
— Samuel Butler (Erewhon)

"Pleasure, after all, is a safer guide than either right or duty. For hard as it is to know what gives us pleasure, right and duty are often still harder to distinguish and, if we go wrong with them, will lead us into just as sorry a plight as a mistaken opinion concerning pleasure. When men burn their fingers through following after pleasure they find out their mistake and get to see where they have gone wrong more easily than when they have burnt them through following after a fancied duty, or a fancied idea concerning right virtue. The devil, in fact, when he dresses himself in angel's clothes, can only be detected by experts of exceptional skill, and so often does he adopt this disguise that it is hardly safe to be seen talking to an angel at all, and prudent people will follow after pleasure as a more homely but more respectable and on the whole much more trustworthy guide."
— 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

"Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature."
— Samuel Butler

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

"It has been said that though 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 (Erewhon Revisited)

"Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics."
— Samuel Butler

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

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

"I never make my books: they grow; they come to me and insist on being written."
— Samuel Butler

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

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

"a man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
"
— Samuel Butler

"The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore."
— Samuel Butler

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

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

"All of the animals except man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it."
— 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

"I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy."
— Samuel Butler

"The major sin is the sin of being born."
— 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 (The Way of All Flesh)