Samuel Butler Quotes

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

~ 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

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

~ Samuel Butler

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

~ Samuel Butler

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

~ Samuel Butler

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

~ Samuel Butler

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.

~ Samuel Butler

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

~ Samuel Butler

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.

~ Samuel Butler

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

~ 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

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime

~ 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

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

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

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

Peter remained on friendly terms with Christ notwithstanding Christ's having healed his mother-in-law.

~ 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

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

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

~ 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

We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to 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

Logic is like the sword--those who appeal to it shall perish by it.

~ 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

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

~ Samuel Butler

I keep my books at the British Museum and at Mudies.

~ 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 can generally bear the separation but I don't like the leave-taking.

~ Samuel Butler

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

~ Samuel Butler

Neither have they hearts to stay Nor wit enough to run away.

~ 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

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

The test of a good critic is whether he knows when and how to believe on insufficient evidence.

~ Samuel Butler

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

~ Samuel Butler

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

~ Samuel Butler

There is one thing certain namely that we can have nothing certain therefore it is not certain that we can have nothing certain.

~ Samuel Butler

Faith is a kind of betting or speculation.

~ Samuel Butler

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

~ Samuel Butler