Samuel Butler Quotes
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Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.
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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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The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
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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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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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The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
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Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
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And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
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Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
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The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
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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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He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.
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Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
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The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
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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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To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
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There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.
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He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.
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Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. If you look at it to admire it, you are lost.
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The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
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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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Let every man be true and every god a liar.
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Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
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The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.