Samuel Butler Quotations | Page 3

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

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

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.

The dead being the majority, it is natural that we should have more friends among them than among the living.

To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.

Through perils both of wind and limb, Through thick and thin she followed him

To himself every one is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an over-praised season delightful if it happens to be a favored one, but in practice very rarely favored and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes

To swallow gudgeons ere they're catched, And count their chickens ere they're hatched

Besides 'tis known he could speak Greek, As naturally as pigs squeak

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

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures 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.

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

Compound for sins they are inclined to by damning those they have no mind to.

The world will only, in the end, follow those who have despised as well as served it.

The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief any more. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.

Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

Quoth Hudibras, I smell a rat; Ralpho, thou dost prevaricate

Quoth Hudibras, Friend Ralph, thou hast Outrun the constable at last

Rare virtues are like rare plants or animals, things that have not been able to hold their own in the world. A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

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!

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

An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the

That vice pays homage to virtue is notorious; we call it hypocrisy

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.

Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way - who husbands it too carefully to waste it where it can be dispensed with

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.

Still amorous, and fond, and billing, / Like Philip and Mary on a shilling.

I've known him for a long time, ... He's always been a man of integrity, always been a man of the community and the needs of the community, and the black community is going to stand behind him.

Nothing is well done nor worth doing unless, take it all round, it has come pretty easily

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

If old Pontifex had had Cromwell's chances he would have done all that Cromwell did, and have done it better; if he had had Giotto's chances he would have done all that Giotto did, and done it no worse; as it was, he was a village carpenter, and I wi

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.

I'll make the fur / Fly round the ears of the old cur.

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

Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way.

Happiness and misery depend not on how high up or low down you are - they depend not upon these, but on the direction in which you are tending

A genius can never expect to have a good time anywhere, if he is a genuine article, but America is about the last place in which life will be endurable at all for an inspired writer of any kind.

And like a lobster boiled, the morn From black to red began to turn

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

All of the animals except for man know that the principle business of life is to enjoy it.

It is not sufficiently considered in the hour of exultation, that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion to what other accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have been allowed him.

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.

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.

Spare the rod and spoil the child.

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.

I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I have loved.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

You cannot have a thing "matter" by itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing "motion" by itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have both or neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving.

They say the test of [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.

We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.

If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.

There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing.

Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.

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.

This world is like Noah's Ark. In which few men but many beasts embark.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

There are two great rules of life; the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule.

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

Science is being daily more and more personified and anthromorphized into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, &c.; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

Friends are like money, easier made than kept.

Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; as true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

There is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.

To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.

If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?

History is a bucket of ashes.

The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.

There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.

Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

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.

The course of true anything never does run smooth.

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.

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.

He dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.

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.

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.

Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate.

Nature. As the word is now commonly used it excludes nature's most interesting productions-the works of man. Nature is usually taken to mean mountains, rivers, clouds and undomesticated animals and plants. I am not indifferent to this half of nature, but it interests me much less than the other half.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of absolute truth.

There is one class of mind that loves to lean on rules and definitions, and another that discards them as far as possible. A faddist will generally ask for a definition of faddism, and one who is not a faddist will be impatient of being asked to give one.

Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.

How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?

An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.

The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.