Samuel Butler > Quotes

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

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

“All animals except man know that the principal 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

“Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
― Samuel Butler

“Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.”
― Samuel Butler

“We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.”
― Samuel Butler

“Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.”
― Samuel Butler

“To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it”
― Samuel Butler

“Life is one long process of getting tired.”
― Samuel Butler

“Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”
― Samuel Butler

“Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.”
― 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

“An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books of Samuel Butler

“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.”
― 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

“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

“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

“Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”
― Samuel Butler

“Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.”
― Samuel Butler

“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”
― Samuel Butler

“Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.”
― 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

“Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds”
― Samuel Butler

“You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books of 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

“I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.”
― Samuel Butler

“The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.”
― Samuel Butler

“A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.”
― Samuel Butler

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

“The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.”
― Samuel Butler

“Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books of Samuel Butler

“Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.”
― Samuel Butler

“we must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in either painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself.”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

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

“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

“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

“Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.”
― Samuel Butler

“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