Samuel Butler (novelist) - Death Quotes

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Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.

Samuel Butler
We do not know what death is. If we know so little about life which we have experienced, how shall be know about death which we have not — and in the nature of things never can?

Samuel Butler
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

Samuel Butler
If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Samuel Butler
Life is the gathering of waves to a head, at death they break into a million fragments each one of which, however, is absorbed at once into the sea of life and helps to form a later generation which comes rolling on till it too breaks.

Samuel Butler
Slugs have ridden their contempt for defensive armour as much to death as the turtles their pursuit of it. They have hardly more than skin enough to hold themselves together; they court death every time they cross the road. Yet death comes not to them more than to the turtle, whose defences are so great that there is little left inside to be defended. Moreover, the slugs fare best in the long run, for turtles are dying out, while slugs are not, and there must be millions of slugs all over the world over for every single turtle.

Samuel Butler
The great characters of fiction live as truly as the memories of dead men. For the life after death it is not necessary that a man or woman should have lived.

Samuel Butler
Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage.

Samuel Butler
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

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
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
Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us.

Samuel Butler