Quotes from Samuel Butler

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.

Young people have a marvelous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances. Even if they are unhappy—very unhappy—it is astonishing how easily they can be prevented from finding it out, or at any rate from attributing it to any other cause than their own sinfulness.

Those who have never had a father can at any rate never know the sweets of losing one. To most men the death of his father is a new lease of life.

He that imposes an oath makes it,Not he that for convenience takes it;Then how can any man be saidTo break an oath he never made?

Cleric before, and Lay behind;A lawless linsey-woolsey brother,Half of one order, half another.

It is bad enough to see one's own good things fathered on other people, but it is worse to have other people's rubbish fathered upon oneself.

I reckon being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better.

Words are not as satisfactory as we should like them to be, but, like our neighbours, we have got to live with them and must make the best and not the worst of them.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

Arguments are like fire-arms which a man may keep at home but should not carry about with him.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

God cannot alter the past, but historians can.

God is Love -- I dare say. But what a mischievous devil Love is

Loyalty is still the same,Whether it win or lose the gameTrue as a dial to the sun,Although it be not shined upon.

Man, unlike the animals, has never learned that the sole purpose of life is to enjoy it.

Men should not try to overstrain their goodness more than any other faculty.

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

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

The course of true anything does not run smooth.

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

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

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.

To do great work a man must be very idle as well as very industrious.

To live is like love, all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.