Samuel Butler quotes

“Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.”

— Samuel Butler

“Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?”

— Samuel Butler

“Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.”

— Samuel Butler

“Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.”

— Samuel Butler

“Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.”

— Samuel Butler

“No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.”

— Samuel Butler

“Opinions have vested interests just as men have.”

— Samuel Butler

“People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.”

— Samuel Butler

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

— Samuel Butler

“People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.”

— Samuel Butler

“Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.”

— 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

“The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.”

— Samuel Butler

“The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.”

— Samuel Butler

“The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.”

— Samuel Butler

“The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.”

— Samuel Butler

“The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.”

— Samuel Butler

“The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.”

— Samuel Butler

“The want of money is the root of all evil.”

— Samuel Butler

“There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.”

— Samuel Butler

“There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.”

— Samuel Butler

“There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.”

— Samuel Butler

“Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.”

— Samuel Butler

“Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.”

— Samuel Butler

“Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.”

— Samuel Butler

“Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.”

— Samuel Butler

“We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.”

— Samuel Butler

“What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.”

— Samuel Butler

“When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.”

— Samuel Butler

“Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.”

— Samuel Butler