Samuel Butler Quotes
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The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
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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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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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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 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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Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
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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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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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Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
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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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Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
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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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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 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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The want of money is the root of all evil.
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Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
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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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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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In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
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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 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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We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.