Samuel Butler (novelist) Quotes

313 Sourced Quotes

Dogs with their tongues their wounds do heal, But men with hands, as thou shalt feel.

Samuel Butler
The father of [geology] was he who seeing fossil shells on a mountain conceived the theory of the deluge.

Samuel Butler
Learn'd he was in medic'nal lore, For by his side a pouch he wore, Replete with strange hermetic powder That wounds nine miles point-blank would solder.

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 idea of an indivisible atom is inconceivable by the lay mind. If we can conceive an idea of the atom at all, we can conceive it as capable of being cut in half...

Samuel Butler
And now the lofty telescope, the scale By which they venture Heav'n itself t' assail, Was raised, and planted full against the Moon.

Samuel Butler
He was in Logick, a great Critick, Profoundly skill'd in Analytick; He could distinguish and divide A hair 'twixt south and south-west side.

Samuel Butler
To try one desp'rate med'cine more; For where your case can be no worse, The desp'rat is the wisest course.

Samuel Butler
Atoms have a mind as much smaller and less complex than ours as their bodies are smaller and less complex.

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
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
Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. 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
Every cold empirick, when his heart is expanded by a successful experiment, swells into a theorist...

Samuel Butler
For error and mistake are infinite, But truth has but one way to be i' th' right.

Samuel Butler
There is no drawing the line between physics and metaphysics. If you examine every day facts at all closely, you are a physicist; but if you press your physics at all home, you become a metaphysician; if you press your metaphysics at all home, you are in a fog.

Samuel Butler
A botanist is a person whose aim is to uproot, kill and exterminate every plant that is at all remarkable for rarity or any special virtue, and the rarer it is the more bitterly he will hunt it down.

Samuel Butler
This hairy meteor did denounce The fall of Scepters and of Crowns.

Samuel Butler
As if a man should be dissected, To see what part is disaffected.

Samuel Butler
I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I have loved.

Samuel Butler
It must always be remembered that man's body is what it is through having been molded into its present shape by the chances and changes of an immense time.

Samuel Butler
The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.

Samuel Butler
In mathematics he was greater Than Tycho Brahe or Erra Pater; For he, by geometric scale, Could take the size of pots of ale; Resolve by sines and tangents straight If bread or butter wanted weight; And wisely tell you what hour o' th' day The clock does strike, by algebra.

Samuel Butler
Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.

Samuel Butler
We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

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

Samuel Butler
The progress of Nature is effected by steps that are often imperceptible and blend into one another with the utmost gentleness.

Samuel Butler
He made an instrument to know If the moon shine at full or no; That would, as soon as e'er she shone straight, Whether 'twere day or night demonstrate; Tell what her d'ameter to an inch is, And prove that she's not made of green cheese.

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
Quoth She: I've heard old cunning Stagers Say, Fools for Arguments use wagers."

Samuel Butler
How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?

Samuel Butler