Poet · British · 1835 – 1902 · 165 quotes
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
Samuel Butler
Poet · British · 1835 – 1902
The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.
I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.
When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?
Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.
And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.
From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.
People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.
Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.
There is nothing so unthinkable as thought, unless it be the entire absence of thought.
Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.
Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
Self-preservation is the first law of nature.
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.
Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.
You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.
If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.
Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.
It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper.
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.
A sense of humor keen enough to show a man his own absurdities will keep him from the commission of all sins, or nearly all, save those worth committing.
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
The seven deadly sins: Want of money, bad health, bad temper, chastity, family ties, knowing that you know things, and believing in the Christian religion.
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
The history of art is the history of revivals.
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.
Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.
Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
It is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.
