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Quotes by Samuel Butler

  • Loyalty is still the same,Whether it win or lose the gameTrue as a dial to the sun,Although it be not shined upon.
  • Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.
  • To live is like love, all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.
  • The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.
  • Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.
  • Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.
  • For truth is precious and divine Too rich a pearl for carnal swine.
  • Life is not an exact science, it is an art.
  • You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.
  • God is Love -- I dare say. But what a mischievous devil Love is
  • It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.
  • God cannot alter the past, but historians can.
  • What makes all doctrines plain and clear- About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was prov'd true before Prove false again Two hundred more.
  • The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and in exactly the right places.
  • I do not mind lying but I hate inaccuracy.
  • To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.
  • Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
  • Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
  • A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.
  • It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma, or want of dogma, that the danger lies.
  • Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.
  • He that is down can fall no lower.
  • It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.
  • Truth is generally kindness, but where the two diverge and collide, kindness should override truth.
  • The course of true anything does not run smooth.
  • Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.
  • Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.
  • There are two great rules in life, the one general and the other particular. The first is that every one can in the end get what he wants if he only tries. This is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is more or less of an exception to the general rule.
  • The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.
  • An apology for the devil it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case God has written all the books.
  • 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.
  • Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.
  • I consider being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill.
  • Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.
  • When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.
  • All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income.