Samuel Butler Quotes
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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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Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
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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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The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
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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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The want of money is the root of all evil.
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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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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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Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
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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 only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into 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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I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.
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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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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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All truth is not to be told at all times.
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Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
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To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
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Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
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Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
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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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Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.
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A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.