Quotes By Samuel Butler

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.

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

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.

We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.