Samuel Butler Quotes - Page 6

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is dead.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.

There is such a thing as doing good that evil may come.

In the midst of vice we are in virtue, and vice versa.

There is no bore like a clever bore.

Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty, bodily or mental.

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

The dons of Oxford and Cambridge are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable.

The dead should be judged like criminals, impartially, but they should be allowed the benefit of the doubt.

My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.

Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing.

Mr. Tennyson has said that more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, but he wisely refrains from saying whether they are good or bad things.

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.

Nobody shoots at Santa Claus.

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.

The voice of the Lord is the voice of common sense, which is shared by all that is.

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers.