Quotes from Samuel Butler

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

All truth is not to be told at all times.

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.

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

When civil fury first grew high,And men fell out they knew not why.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

The want of money is the root of all evil.

Priests are not men of the world it is not intended that they should be and a University training is the one best adapted to prevent their becoming so.

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.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

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.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

Such as do build their faith uponThe holy text of pike and gun.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

Always eat grapes downward — that is eat the best grapes first; in this way there will be none better left on the bunch, and each grape will seem good down to the last. If you eat the other way, you will not have a good grape in the lot.

We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.

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

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.

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

For what is worth in anythingBut so much money as 'twill bring?

The Bible may be the truth but it's not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.