Quotes by Samuel Butler
Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.
A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.
The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.
It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.
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.
Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
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.
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.
Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.
Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.
Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.
The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.
Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.
Half the vices which the world condemns most loudly have seeds of good in them and require moderate use rather than total abstinence.
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.
Christ: I dislike him very much. Still, I can stand him. What I cannot stand is the wretched band of people whose profession is to hoodwink us about him.
There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.
In old times people used to try and square the circle; now they try and devise schemes for satisfying the Irish nation.
Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.
No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.
Justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
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.
We all like to forgive, and love best not those who offend us least, nor who have done most for us, but those who make it most easy for us to forgive them.
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.
