Samuel Butler (novelist) - Man Quotes

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All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it—and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow.

Samuel Butler
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Samuel Butler
The supposition that the world is ever in league to put a man down is childish. Hardly less childish is it for an author to lay the blame on reviewers. A good sturdy author is a match for a hundred reviewers.

Samuel Butler
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities, as well as those of other people, will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those that are worth committing.

Samuel Butler
As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names — not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.

Samuel Butler
They say the test of this [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say Can he name a kitten? And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

Samuel Butler
Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Samuel Butler
We are not won by arguments that we can analyse, but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.

Samuel Butler
A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical operation, or that he has some disease which will shortly kill him, or that he will be a cripple or blind for the rest of his life; dreadful as such tidings must be, we do not find that they unnerve the greatest number of mankind; most men, indeed, go coolly enough even to be hanged, but the strongest quail before financial ruin, and the better men they are, the more complete, as a general rule, is their prostration.

Samuel Butler
If a man would get hold of the public era, he must pay, marry, or fight.

Samuel Butler
Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

Samuel Butler
A man's style in any art should be like his dress — it should attract as little attention as possible.

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
A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the main aim of his life.

Samuel Butler
I heard a man say that brigands demand your money or your life, whereas women require both.

Samuel Butler
A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Samuel Butler
One can bring no greater reproach against a man than to say that he does not set sufficient value upon pleasure, and there is no greater sign of a fool than the thinking that he can tell at once and easily what it is that pleases him. To know this is not easy, and how to extend our knowledge of it is the highest and the most neglected of all arts and branches of education.

Samuel Butler
Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.

Samuel Butler
If a man has not studied painting, or at any rate black and white drawing, his eyes are wild; learning to draw tames them. The first step towards taming the eyes is to teach them not to see too much.

Samuel Butler
A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

Samuel Butler
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

Samuel Butler
The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable; absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is, let alone the dullnesses of it and the pomposities of it.

Samuel Butler
We see but a part, and being thus unable to generalize human conduct, except very roughly, we deny that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much both of a man's character and actions to chance, or luck, or fortune.

Samuel Butler
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

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
It does not matter much what a man hates provided he hates something.

Samuel Butler
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

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

Samuel Butler
Stowed away in a Montreal lumber room
The Discobolus standeth and turneth his face to the wall;
Dusty, cobweb-covered, maimed and set at naught,
Beauty crieth in an attic and no man regardeth:
O God! O Montreal!

Samuel Butler
Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

Samuel Butler