Samuel Butler Quotes

Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

By Samuel Butler

The public do not know enough to be experts, but know enough to decide between them.

By Samuel Butler

For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure --tangible material prosperity in this world --is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.

By Samuel Butler

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg. Nature

By Samuel Butler

I went to the Bach Choir concert and heard Mozart's Requiem. I did not rise warmly to it. Then I heard an extract from Parsifal which I disliked very much. If Bach wriggles, Wagner writhes...

By Samuel Butler

Logic is like the sword

By Samuel Butler

A lawyers dream of heaven; every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

By Samuel Butler

To himself everyone is an immortal. He may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

By Samuel Butler

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

By Samuel Butler

God cannot alter the past, though historians can. History

By Samuel Butler

Heaven is the work of the best and kindest men and women. Hell is the work of prigs, pedants and professional truth-tellers. The world is an attempt to make the best of Heaven and Hell.

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

Eating is touch carried to the bitter end.

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

Everyone should keep a mental wastepaper basket, and the older he grows, the more things will he promptly consign to it.

By Samuel Butler

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday.

By Samuel Butler

A hen is only a egg's way of making another egg.

By Samuel Butler

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead. Death

By Samuel Butler

Conscience is thoroughly well-bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.

By Samuel Butler

Union may be strength, but it is mere blind brute strength unless wisely directed.

By Samuel Butler

Birth and death are so closely related that one could not destroy either without destroying the other at the same time. It is extinction that makes creation possible.

By Samuel Butler

The history of art is the history of revivals. Art

By 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.

By Samuel Butler

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

By Samuel Butler

Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.

By Samuel Butler

When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

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.

By Samuel Butler