Samuel Butler Quotes - Page 4

I really do not see much use in exalting the humble and meek; they do not remain humble and meek long when they are exalted.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.

Be virtuous and you will be vicious.

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.

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.

[P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

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

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

The Ancient Mariner would not have taken so well if it had been called The Old Sailor.

Look before you leap for as you sow, ye are like to reap.

A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner, but more durable alloy.

Opinions have vested interests just as men have.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

Let us eat and drink neither forgetting death unduly nor remembering it. The Lord hath mercy on whom he will have mercy, etc., and the less we think about it the better.

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.

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

A lawyer's dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.