Samuel Butler Quotes
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Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.
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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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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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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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All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.
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Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
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Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
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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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The want of money is the root of all evil.
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In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
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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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Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
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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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The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
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If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.
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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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Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
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Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.
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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 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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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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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.
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I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.