Top 244 Quotes & Sayings by Samuel Butler - Page 4

He that complies against his will, Is of his own opinion still.

When the water of a place is bad it is safest to drink none that has not been filtered through either the berry of a grape, or else a tub of malt. These are the most reliable filters yet invented.

Friends are like money, easier made than kept.

An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.

Flying. Whatever any other organism has been able to do man should surely be able to do also, though he may go a different way about it.

There are two classes [of scientists], those who want to know, and do not care whether others think they know or not, and those who do not much care about knowing, but care very greatly about being reputed as knowing.

Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it - and they do enjoy it as much as man and other circumstances will allow.

I believe that he was really sorry that people would not believe he was sorry that he was not more sorry.

Cat-Ideas and Mouse-Ideas. We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble-no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children. They are not without use and comfort, but it is not easy to take them very seriously.

The course of true anything never does run smooth.

In practice it is seldom very hard to do one's duty when one knows what it is, but it is sometimes extremely difficult to find this out.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period.

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

Our own death is a premium which we must pay for the far greater benefit we have derived from the fact that so many people have not only lived but also died before us.

Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate.

I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I have loved.

To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.

Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.

The foundations which we would dig about and find are within us, like the kingdom of heaven, rather than without.

Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.

Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud.

When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.

He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.

There are two great rules of life; the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule.

The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.

Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; as true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.

If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?

There is a photographer in every bush, going about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour.

Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.

History is a bucket of ashes.

Science is being daily more and more personified and anthromorphized into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, &c.; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific bigwigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

Brigands will demand your money or your life, but a woman will demand both

Inspiration is never genuine if it is known as inspiration at the time. True inspiration always steals on a person; its importance not being fully recognized for some time.

Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.

The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.

Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.

This world is like Noah's Ark. In which few men but many beasts embark.

The human intellect owes its superiority over that of the lower animals in great measure to the stimulus which alcohol has given imagination.

A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the main aim of his life.

You cannot have a thing "matter" by itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing "motion" by itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have both or neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving.

They say the test of [literary power] is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, "Can he name a kitten?" And by this test I am condemned, for I cannot.

The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.

It is not sufficiently considered in the hour of exultation, that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion to what other accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have been allowed him.

The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.

It seems to be the fate of man to seek all his consolations in futurity. The time present is seldom able to fill desire or imagination with immediate enjoyment, and we are forced to supply its deficiencies by recollection or anticipation.

How often do we not see children ruined through the virtues, real or supposed, of their parents?

He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.

He dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

There should be asylums for habitual teetotalers, but they would probably relapse into teetotalism as soon as they got out.

We all love best not those who offend us least, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.

Adversity, if a man is set down to it by degrees, is more supportable with equanimity by most people than any great prosperity arrived at in a single lifetime.

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.