Samuel Butler (novelist) - People Quotes

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The family. I believe more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other—I mean the attempt to prolong family connection unduly, and to make people hang together artificially who would never naturally do so.

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

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
If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.

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

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
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
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
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
The Will-be and the Has-been touch us more nearly than the Is. So we are more tender towards children and old people than to those who are in the prime of life.

Samuel Butler
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

Samuel Butler
People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.

Samuel Butler
Whether the universe is really a paying concern, or whether it is an inflated bubble that must burst sooner or later, this is another matter. If people were to demand cash payment in irrefragable certainty for everything that they have taken hitherto as paper money on the credit of the bank of public opinion, is there money enough behind it all to stand so great a drain even on so great a reserve?

Samuel Butler
If people like being deceived — and this can hardly be doubted — there can rarely have been a time during which they can have had more of the wish than now. The literary, scientific and religious worlds vie with one another in trying to gratify the public.

Samuel Butler
We meet people every day whose bodies are evidently those of men and women long dead, but whose appearance we know through their portraits.

Samuel Butler
People say that there are neither dragons to be killed nor distressed maidens to be rescued nowadays. I do not know, but I think I have dropped across one or two, nor do I feel sure whether the most mortal wounds have been inflicted by the dragons or by myself.

Samuel Butler
Our world — like Noah's ark: a handful of people and lots of creatures.

Samuel Butler
My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.

Samuel Butler
God does not intend people, and does not like people, to be too good. He likes them neither too good nor too bad, but a little too bad is more venial with him than a little too good.

Samuel Butler
It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.

Samuel Butler
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

Samuel Butler
It is bad enough to see one's own good things fathered on other people, but it is worse to have other people's rubbish fathered upon oneself.

Samuel Butler
Is there any religion whose followers can be pointed to as distinctly more amiable and trustworthy than those of any other? If so, this should be enough. I find the nicest and best people generally profess no religion at all, but are ready to like the best men of all religions.

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
To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not.

Samuel Butler
If we are asked what is the most essential characteristic that underlies this word, the word itself will guide us to gentleness, to absence of such things as brow-beating, overbearing manners and fuss, and generally to consideration for other people.

Samuel Butler
When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.

Samuel Butler
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy—very unhappy—it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

Samuel Butler
When I am dead I would rather people thought me better than I was instead of worse; but if they think me worse, I cannot help it and, if it matters at all, it will matter more to them than to me.

Samuel Butler
I doubt whether any angel would find me very entertaining. As for myself, if ever I do entertain one it will have to be unawares. When people entertain others without an introduction they generally turn out more like devils than angels.

Samuel Butler