Samuel Butler (novelist) Quotes

313 Sourced Quotes

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
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.

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

Samuel Butler
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

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

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

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
I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I dare say I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all.

Samuel Butler
X-rays. Their moral is this—that a right way of looking at things will see through almost anything.

Samuel Butler
In the highest consciousness there is still unconsciousness, in the lowest unconsciousness there is still consciousness. If there is no consciousness there is no thing, or nothing. To understand perfectly would be to cease to understand at all.

Samuel Butler
How thankful we ought to be that Wordsworth was only a poet and not a musician. Fancy a symphony by Wordsworth! Fancy having to sit it out! And fancy what it would have been if he had written fugues!

Samuel Butler
Argument is generally waste of time and trouble. It is better to present one's opinion and leave it to stick or no as it may happen. If sound, it will probably in the end stick, and the sticking is the main thing.

Samuel Butler
The devil tempted Christ; yes, but it was Christ who tempted the devil to tempt him.

Samuel Butler
The true laws of God are the laws of our own well-being.

Samuel Butler
Painters should remember that the eye, as a general rule, is a good, simple, credulous organ — very ready to take things on trust if it be told them with any confidence of assertion.

Samuel Butler
It is curious that money, which is the most valuable thing in life, exceptis excipiendis, should be the most fatal corrupter of music, literature, painting and all the arts. As soon as any art is pursued with a view to money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.

Samuel Butler
No one thinks he will escape death, so there is no disappointment and, as long as we know neither the when nor the how, the mere fact that we shall one day have to go does not much affect us; we do not care, even though we know vaguely that we have not long to live. The serious trouble begins when death becomes definite in time and shape. It is in precise fore-knowledge, rather than in sin, that the sting of death is to be found; and such fore-knowledge is generally withheld; though, strangely enough, many would have it if they could.

Samuel Butler
Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering had been undergone in the streets leading from St George's, Hanover Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate.

Samuel Butler
Nothing will ever die so long as it knows what to do under the circumstances, in other words so long as it knows its business.

Samuel Butler
He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most; God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

Samuel Butler
God's merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion.

Samuel Butler
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

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
There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.

Samuel Butler
An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.

Samuel Butler
It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Samuel Butler
Genius... has been defined as a supreme capacity for taking trouble... It might be more fitly described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds and keeping them therein so long as the genius remains.

Samuel Butler
We are so far identical with our ancestors and our contemporaries that it is very rarely we can see anything that they do not see. It is not unjust that the sins of the fathers should be visited upon the children, for the children committed the sins when in the persons of their fathers.

Samuel Butler
Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.

Samuel Butler