Samuel Butler Quotes - Page 2

The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.
Samuel Butler
It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.
Samuel Butler
Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it-torn up to irrecoverable tatters.
Samuel Butler
Neither have they hearts to stay Nor wit enough to run away.
Samuel Butler
Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.
Samuel Butler
People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted and at seeing it practised.
Samuel Butler
I can generally bear the separation but I don't like the leave-taking.
Samuel Butler
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
Books should be tried by a judge and jury as though they were crimes.
Samuel Butler
I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies.
Samuel Butler
The great 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
People are lucky and unlucky ... according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
Samuel Butler
Theist and atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
Samuel Butler
Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism …
Samuel Butler
Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded.
Samuel Butler
Loyalty is still the same, whether it win or lose the game; true as a dial to the sun, although it be not shined upon.
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
Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.
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
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 world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.
Samuel Butler
We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.
Samuel Butler
We are not won by arguments that we can analyze but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.
Samuel Butler
A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.
Samuel Butler
A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.
Samuel Butler
Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.
Samuel Butler
Peter remained on friendly terms with Christ notwithstanding Christ's having healed his mother-in-law.
Samuel Butler
I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong.
Samuel Butler
Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.
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
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
Samuel Butler
Words are clothes that thoughts wear
Samuel Butler
We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.
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
If people who are in a difficulty will only do the first little reasonable thing which they can clearly recognize as reasonable, they will always find the next step more easy both to see and take.
Samuel Butler
Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime
Samuel Butler
If, again, the most superficial introspection teaches the physiologist that his conscious life is dependent upon the mechanical adjustments of his body, and that inversely his body is subjected with certain limitations to his will, then it only remains for him to make one assumption more, namely, that this mutual interdependence between the spiritual and the material is itself also dependent on law, and he has discovered the bond by which the science of the matter and the science of consciousness are united into a single whole.
Samuel Butler
Parents are the last people on Earth who ought to have children.
Samuel Butler
There are orphanages," he exclaimed to himself, "for children who have lost their parents--oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?
Samuel Butler
Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.
Samuel Butler
In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.
Samuel Butler
Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.
Samuel Butler
To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.
Samuel Butler
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
Samuel Butler
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
Samuel Butler
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
Samuel Butler
I remember one incident which bears upon this part of the treatise. The gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco-pipe; he examined it carefully, and when he came to the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl he seemed much delighted, and exclaimed that it must be rudimentary. I asked him what he meant."Sir," he answered, "this organ is identical with the rim at the bottom of a cup; it is but another form of the same function. Its purposes must have been to keep the heat of the pipe from marking the table upon which it rested. You would find, if you were to look up the history of tobacco-pipes, that in early specimens this protuberance was of a different shape to what it is now. It will have been broad at the bottom, and flat, so that while the pipe was being smoked the bowl might rest upon the table without marking it. Use and disuse must have come into play and reduced the function its present rudimentary condition. I should not be surprised, sir," he continued, "if, in the course of time, it were to become modified still farther, and to assume the form of an ornamental leaf or scroll, or even a butterfly, while in some cases, it will become extinct.
Samuel Butler
The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.
Samuel Butler
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Samuel Butler
[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
Samuel Butler
Embryos think with each stage of their development that they have now reached the only condition that really suits them. This, they say, must certainly be their last, inasmuch as its close will be so great a shock that nothing can survive it. Every change is a shock; every shock is a pro tanto death. What we call death is only a shock great enough to destroy our power to recognize a past and a present as resembling one another.
Samuel Butler
All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.
Samuel Butler
Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.
Samuel Butler