Samuel Butler Quotes

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

– Samuel Butler

Men take so much delight in lying that Truth is sometimes forced to disguise herself in the habit of Falsehood to get entertainment.

– Samuel Butler

If people dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.

– Samuel Butler

The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.

– Samuel Butler

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

– Samuel Butler

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

– Samuel Butler

It is always the same story … the more young people have the more they want, and the less thanks one gets.

– Samuel Butler

There is no bore like a clever bore.

– Samuel Butler

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

– Samuel Butler

Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority.

– Samuel Butler

Learning is like a great house that requires a great charge to keep it in repair.

– 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

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

– Samuel Butler

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

– Samuel Butler

Don’t learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

– Samuel Butler

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

– Samuel Butler

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

– 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 healthy stomach is nothing if not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

– Samuel Butler

Surely nature might find some less irritating way of carrying on business if she would give her mind to it. Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account?

– 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

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

– Samuel Butler

To put one’s trust in God is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.

– 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.

– Samuel Butler

God cannot alter the past, that is why he is obliged to connive at the existence of historians.

– Samuel Butler

The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.

– Samuel Butler

The world has long ago settled that morality and virtue are what bring men peace at the last. ‘Be virtuous,’ says the copy-book, ‘and you will be happy.’ Surely if a reputed virtue fails often in this respect it is only an insidious form of vice, and if a reputed vice brings no very serious mischief on a man’s later years it is not so bad a vice as it is said to be. Unfortunately, though we are all of a mind about the main opinion that virtue is what tends to happiness, and vice what ends in sorrow, we are not so unanimous about details.

– Samuel Butler

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

– Samuel Butler

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

– Samuel Butler