Top 244 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Butler - Page 3
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a British poet Samuel Butler.
Last updated on December 25, 2024.
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.
The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
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.
My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.
Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
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.
Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.
God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.
There is no bore like a clever bore.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.
A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.
I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.
The want of money is the root of all evil.
If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.
Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.
The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.
If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.
It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
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.
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.
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.
Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.
Be virtuous and you will be vicious.
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.
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
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.
The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.
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.
To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.
And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Letters are like wine; if they are sound they ripen with keeping. A man should lay down letters as he does a cellar of wine.
He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.
Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.
God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.
The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.
[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.
They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?"
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
Let man be true and every god a liar.
Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.
Spare the rod and spoil the child.
Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.
God and the Devil are an effort after specialisation and division of labour.
Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.
And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
If I die prematurely at any rate I shall be saved from being bored to death by my own success.
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