Samuel Butler (novelist) Quotes

313 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Samuel Butler
Youth is like spring, an overpraised season—delightful if it happen to be a favored one, but in practice…more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes.

Samuel Butler
To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

Samuel Butler
We play out our days as we play out cards, taking them as they come, not knowing what they will be, hoping for a lucky card and sometimes getting one, often getting just the wrong one.

Samuel Butler
Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.

Samuel Butler
We no more deny the essential value of religion because we hold most religions false, and most professors of religion liars, than we deny that of science because we can see no great difference between men of science and theologians.

Samuel Butler
Through perils both of wind and limb,
Through thick and thin she follow'd him
In Every adventure he undertook,
And never him or it forsook.

Samuel Butler
It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.

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
In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.

Samuel Butler
Every one should keep a mental waste-paper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it — torn up to irrecoverable tatters.

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

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
Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.

Samuel Butler
The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.

Samuel Butler
To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.

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

Samuel Butler
Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

Samuel Butler