Samuel Butler > Quotes

“Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.”
― Samuel Butler

“The greatest pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him, and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself, too.”
― Samuel Butler

“All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

“Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”
― Samuel Butler

“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

“All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”
― Samuel Butler

“Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.”
― Samuel Butler

“Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh

“Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.”
― Samuel Butler

“Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.”
― Samuel Butler

“Life is one long process of getting tired.”
― Samuel Butler

“An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

“Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
― Samuel Butler

“We all love best not those who offend us least, nor those who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.”
― Samuel Butler

“Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.”
― Samuel Butler

“Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”
― Samuel Butler

“Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.”
― Samuel Butler

“Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.”
― Samuel Butler

“We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.”
― Samuel Butler

“To live is like to love--all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it”
― Samuel Butler

“The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.”
― Samuel Butler

“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.”
― Samuel Butler

“A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.”
― Samuel Butler

“I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.”
― Samuel Butler

“[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.”
― Samuel Butler

“They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?”
― Samuel Butler

“A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”
― Samuel Butler, The Note Books Of Samuel Butler

“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”
― Samuel Butler

“Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if you do not you can filch them; if you play them with anything like judgment you will find yourselves heads of happy, united, God-fearing families... True, your children will probably find out all about it some day, but not until too late to be of much service to them or inconvenience to yourself.”
― Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh