Samuel Butler (novelist) Quotes

313 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Samuel Butler