Quotes By Samuel Butler

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

The one serious conviction that a man should have is that nothing is to be taken too seriously.

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.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

Logic is like the sword - those who appeal to it, shall perish by it.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyse but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.

Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

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.

If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

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.

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

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