Samuel Butler Quotes

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

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

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

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

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

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

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

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

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

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

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

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

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

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

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

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

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

There is no bore like a clever bore.

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

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

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.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

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

The course of true anything never does run smooth.

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.

For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

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

Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.

The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

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

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

God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.

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

Let man be true and every god a liar.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

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

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

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.