Skip to content
Samuel Butler
Quotes by Samuel Butler
Quotes by Samuel Butler
“Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.”
Samuel Butler
“It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.”
Samuel Butler
“The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.”
Samuel Butler
“The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.”
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
“Life is one long process of getting tired.”
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
“It is tact that is golden, not silence.”
Samuel Butler
“A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.”
Samuel Butler
“Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.”
Samuel Butler
“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
Samuel Butler
“Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.”
Samuel Butler
“Life is not an exact science, it is an art.”
Samuel Butler
“Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.”
Samuel Butler
“To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.”
Samuel Butler
“Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.”
Samuel Butler
“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”
Samuel Butler
“Self-preservation is the first law of nature.”
Samuel Butler
“A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.”
Samuel Butler
“It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper.”
Samuel Butler
“Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.”
Samuel Butler
“All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”
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
“In law, nothing is certain but the expense.”
Samuel Butler
“Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.”
Samuel Butler
“If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.”
Samuel Butler
“A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.”
Samuel Butler
“Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.”
Samuel Butler
“God cannot alter the past, though historians can.”
Samuel Butler
“The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.”
Samuel Butler