Samuel Butler Quotes
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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.
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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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Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
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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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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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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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The want of money is the root of all evil.
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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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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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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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The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
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The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
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Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
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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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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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In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
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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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Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.
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Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
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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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Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
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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.