Samuel Butler (novelist) Quotes

313 Sourced Quotes

Cry out upon the stars for doing Ill offices, to cross their wooing.

Samuel Butler
There is one thing certain, namely that we can have nothing certain; and therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain.

Samuel Butler
There is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Samuel Butler
You cannot have a thing "matter" by itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing "motion" by itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have both or neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving.

Samuel Butler
Science and religion are reconciled in amiable and sensible people but nowhere else.

Samuel Butler
[An] organism must act in one or other of these two ways: It must either change slowly and continuously with the surroundings, paying cash for everything, meeting the smallest change with a corresponding modification so far as is found convenient; or it must put off change as long as possible, and then make larger and more sweeping changes.

Samuel Butler
It was a monotonous life, but it was very healthy; and one does not much mind anything when one is well.

Samuel Butler
Why should the botanist, geologist or other-ist give himself such airs.... Is it because he names his plants or specimens with Latin names, and divides them into genre and species.

Samuel Butler
Water is frozen steam, and ice frozen water.

Samuel Butler
Diseases of their own accord, But cures come difficult and hard.

Samuel Butler
The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan and the whole fixed upon stilts.

Samuel Butler
Every idea has something of the pain and peril of childbirth about it; ideas are just as mortal and just as immortal as organized beings are.

Samuel Butler
There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.

Samuel Butler