Samuel Butler Quotes - Page 3

Life is a quarry, out of which we are to mold and chisel and complete a character.

Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.

The healthy stomach is nothing if it is not conservative. Few radicals have good digestions.

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

Belief like any other moving body follows the path of least resistance.

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

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

No mistake is more common and more fatuous than appealing to logic in cases which are beyond her jurisdiction.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

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

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

Let man be true and every god a liar.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

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.