Samuel Butler Quotes
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If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
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An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
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Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
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I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.
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There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
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Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
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Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.
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If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.
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Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
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There is no bore like a clever bore.
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I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.
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All truth is not to be told at all times.
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Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
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Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
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There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.
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The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
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Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.
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Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
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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.
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The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
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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.
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God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
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The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
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The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.