Top 244 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Butler - Page 2
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British poet Samuel Butler.
Last updated on April 17, 2025.
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.
To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.
The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.
Let every man be true and every god a liar.
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.
There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.
Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
Opinions have vested interests just as men have.
The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.
Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.
Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.
A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.
The history of art is the history of revivals.
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
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.
The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.
There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.
It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.
There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.
A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.
Priests are not men of the world; it is not intended that they should be; and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.
The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.
There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.
A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.
All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.
Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.
The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.
Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.
Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.
The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.
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