Samuel Butler (novelist) - The Way of All Flesh

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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
'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

Samuel Butler
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

Samuel Butler
I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

Samuel Butler
A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them.

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

Samuel Butler
An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.

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
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
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
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
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
A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.

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
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
We know so well what we are doing ourselves and why we do it, do we not? I fancy that there is some truth in the view which is being put forward nowadays, that it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

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
One great reason why clergymen's households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home or close about the house.

Samuel Butler
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

Samuel Butler
Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.

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 best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

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
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