Quotes By Samuel Butler

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.

Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.

From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.

Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.

For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.