Quotes By Samuel Butler

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

The want of money is the root of all evil.

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.

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

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.

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

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

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.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.

The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.

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.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.

To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy 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.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.