Samuel Butler Famous Quotes
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No miracle was effected without means of some kind; the difference between the faithful and the unbeliever consisted in the very fact that the former could see a miracle where the latter could not. The
Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.
In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.
The only absolute morality is absolute stagnation.
Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy - very unhappy - it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.
To parents who wish to lead a quiet life I would say: Tell your children that they are naughty - much naughtier than most children. Point to the young people of some acquaintances as models of perfection and impress your own children with a deep sense of their own inferiority. You carry so many more guns than they do that they cannot fight you. This is called moral influence, and it will enable you to bounce them as much as you please. They think you know and they will not have yet caught you lying often enough to suspect that you are not the unworldly and scrupulously truthful person which you represent yourself to be; nor yet will they know how great a coward you are, nor how soon you will run away if they fight you with persistency and judgment. You keep the dice and throw them both for your children and yourself. Load them then, for you can easily manage to stop your children from examining them. Tell them how singularly indulgent you are; insist on the incalculable benefit you conferred upon them, firstly in bringing them into the world at all, but more particularly in bringing them into it as your own children rather than anyone else's... You hold all the trump cards, or if
The major sin is the sin of being born.
This world is like Noah's Ark.
In which few men but many beasts embark.
His knowledge was not far behind
The knight's, but of another kind,
And he another way came by't ;
Some call it Gifts, and some New Light.
A lib'ral art, that costs no pains
Of study, industry, or brains.
When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can
it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.
To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.
He is greatest who is most often in men's good thoughts.
As there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere.
Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.
It is not sufficiently considered in the hour of exultation, that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion to what other accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have been allowed him.
The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered.
Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.
Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.
Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
He was born stupid, and greatly increased his birthright.
Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.
What can it matter to me,' he says, 'whether people read my books or not? It may matter to (the critics)
but I have too much money to want more, and if the books have any stuff in them it will work by and by. I do not know nor greatly care whether they are good or not. What opinion can any sane man form about his own work? Some people must write stupid books just as there must be junior ops and third-class poll men. Why should I complain of being among the mediocrities? If a man is not absolutely below mediocrity let him be thankful
besides, the books will have to stand by themselves some day, so the sooner they begin the better.
If [science] tends to thicken the crust of ice on which, as it were, we are skating, it is all right. If it tries to find, or professes to have found, the solid ground at the bottom of the water it is all wrong. Our business is with the thickening of this crust by extending our knowledge downward from above, as ice gets thicker while the frost lasts; we should not try to freeze upwards from the bottom.
For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.
An obstinate man does not hold opinions, but they hold him; for when he is once possessed with an error, it is, like a devil, only cast out with great difficulty.
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.
The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.
Neither irony or sarcasm is argument.
Since God himself cannot change the past, He is obliged to tolerate the existence of historians.
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.
What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.
The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.
Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.
Conscience is thoroughly well bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.
Life is one long process of getting tired.
Be virtuous and you will be vicious.
A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?
A man should have any number of little aims about which he should be conscious and for which he should have names, but he should have neither name for, nor consciousness concerning the main aim of his life.
It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.
The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.
We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to them.
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.
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income
I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.
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.
There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.
Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
When you've told someone that you've left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.
From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.
He that complies against his will
Is of his own opinion still.
I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong.
The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.
Whereas, to borrow an illustration from mathematics, life was formerly an equation of, say, 100 unknown quantities, it is now one of 99 only, inasmuch as memory and heredity have been shown to be one and the same thing.
Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.
To live is like to love
all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it
The course of true anything never does run smooth.
The extremes of vice and virtue are alike detestable, and absolute virtue is as sure to kill a man as absolute vice is.
Money is the last enemy that shall never be subdued. While there is flesh there is money or the want of money, but money is always on the brain so long as there is a brain in reasonable order.
You cannot have a thing "matter" by itself which shall have no motion in it, nor yet a thing "motion" by itself which shall exist apart from matter; you must have both or neither. You can have matter moving much, or little, and in all conceivable ways; but you cannot have matter without any motion more than you can have motion without any matter that is moving.
It is far safer to know too little than too much. People will condemn the one, though they will resent being called upon to exert themselves to follow the other.
To die completely, a person must not only forget but be forgotten, and he who is not forgotten is not dead.
The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.
The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.
There are orphanages," he exclaimed to himself, "for children who have lost their parents--oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?
In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
Science is being daily more and more personified and anthromorphized into a god. By and by they will say that science took our nature upon him, and sent down his only begotten son, Charles Darwin, or Huxley, into the world so that those who believe in him, &c.; and they will burn people for saying that science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.
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.
Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.
Though analogy is often misleading, it is the least misleading thing we have.
I said to him one day that the very slender reward which God had attached to the pursuit of serious inquiry was a sufficient proof that He disapproved of it, or at any rate that he did not set much store by it nor wish to encourage it.
[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.
People are lucky and unlucky not according to what they get absolutely, but according to the ratio between what they get and what they have been led to expect.
There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.
The want of money is the root of all evil.
We can never get rid of mouse-ideas completely, they keep turning up again and again, and nibble, nibble
no matter how often we drive them off. The best way to keep them down is to have a few good strong cat-ideas which will embrace them and ensure their not reappearing till they do so in another shape.
Whatsoever we perpetrate, we do but row; we are steered by fate.
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.
I fall asleep in the full and certain hope That my slumber shall not be broken; And that, though I be all-forgetting, Yet shall I not be all-forgotten, But continue that life in the thoughts and deeds of those I have loved.
Silence and tact may or may not be the same thing.
Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.
Opinions have vested interests just as men have.
To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.
History is a bucket of ashes.
If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.
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.
A credulous mind ... finds most delight in believing
strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass
with him; but never regards those that are plain and
feasible, for every man can believe such.
There was no doubt that Theobald passed peacefully away during his sleep. Can a man who died thus be said to have died at all? He has presented the phenomena of death to other people, but in respect of himself he has not only not died, but has not even thought that he was going to die. This is not more than half dying, but then neither was his life more than half living. He presented so many of the phenomena of living that I suppose on the whole it would be less trouble to think of him as having been alive than as never having been born at all, but
For as whipp'd tops and bandied balls,
The learned hold, are animals;
So horses they affirm to be
Mere engines made by geometry
One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.
When people talk of atoms obeying fixed laws, they are either ascribing some kind of intelligence and free will to atoms or they are talking nonsense. There is no obedience unless there is at any rate a potentiality of disobeying.
If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue.
Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds
Neither have they hearts to stay, nor wit enough to run away.