Samuel Butler Quotes

Samuel Butler Quotes. Below is a collection of famous Samuel Butler quotes. Here you can find the most popular and greatest quotes by Samuel Butler. Share these quotations with your friends and family.

He that complies against his will is of his own opinion still.

By Samuel Butler

The function of vice is to keep virtue within reasonable bounds.

By 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.

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

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.

By Samuel Butler

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.

By Samuel Butler

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

By Samuel Butler

From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

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.

By Samuel Butler

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.

By Samuel Butler

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.

By Samuel Butler

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

By Samuel Butler

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

By Samuel Butler

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.

By Samuel Butler

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

By Samuel Butler

Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

By Samuel Butler

Don't learn to do, but learn in doing. Let your falls not be on a prepared ground, but let them be bona fide falls in the rough and tumble of the world.

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

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

By Samuel Butler

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

By Samuel Butler

When the righteous man truth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.

By Samuel Butler