Famous Quotes

Quotes by Samuel Butler

• 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.
• A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
• A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.
• A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.
• 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.
• 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.
• A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.
• All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
• All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.
• All truth is not to be told at all times.
• An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.
• And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
• Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
• Brigands demand your money or your life women require both.
• Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.
• Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
• Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.
• Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.
• For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
• Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
• From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
• God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.
• God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.
• God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
• God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.
• 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.
• Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.
• 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.
• If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.
• If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.
• In law, nothing is certain but the expense.
• It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
• It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
• It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
• Let every man be true and every god a liar.
• 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.
• Life is like music it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
• Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
• Life is not an exact science, it is an art.