Quotes By Samuel Butler

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.

Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.

There is no bore like a clever bore.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

If God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

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.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

Our ideas are for the most part like bad sixpences, and we spend our lives trying to pass them on one another.

Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.

Christ and The Church: If he were to apply for a divorce on the grounds of cruelty, adultery and desertion, he would probably get one.

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

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

Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

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

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things.

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

Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.