Samuel Butler Quotes | GloryQuotes

Samuel Butler Quotes About Life

Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

All animals, except man, know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

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.

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

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

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.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

Samuel Butler Quotes About Money

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

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

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.

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

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

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

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

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

More Quotes by Samuel Butler

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

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

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

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

All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

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

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

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

To live is like to love - all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

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

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

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.

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

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

There are more fools than knaves in the world, else the knaves would not have enough to live upon.

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.

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.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

If you follow reason far enough it always leads to conclusions that are contrary to reason.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If people would dare to speak to one another unreservedly, there would be a good deal less sorrow in the world a hundred years hence.

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

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

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

Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.

A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.

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

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.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.

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

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

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

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

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

Browse 165 quotes attributed to Samuel Butler, listed in the source data as a British Poet, organized around themes such as Life, Money, Art. Use the topic links to explore similar quotes, or browse the full author collection in one place.