Samuel Butler Quotes
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The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
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The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
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All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
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There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
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Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
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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.
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Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.
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Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
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It is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is often exceedingly difficult to find this out.
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Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
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People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
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Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.
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The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.
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Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
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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 worth committing.
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Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
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They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'
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Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
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The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
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We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
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In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
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The want of money is the root of all evil.
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The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
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A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.