Quotes from Samuel Butler

Truth is generally kindness, but where the two diverge and collide, kindness should override truth.

What makes all doctrines plain and clear- About two hundred pounds a year. And that which was prov'd true before Prove false again Two hundred more.

Books are like imprisoned souls until someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

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

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

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

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

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.

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

To me it seems that youth is like spring, an overpraised season-- delightful if it happen to be a favoured one, but in practice very rarely favoured and more remarkable, as a general rule, for biting east winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

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

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

Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

we must judge men not so much by what they, as by what they make us feel that they have it in them to do. If a man has done enough in either painting, music, or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in an emergency he has done enough

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

Happiness and misery consist in a progression towards better or worse; it does not matter how high up or low down you are, it depends not on this, but on the direction in which you are tending.

A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.

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.

Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.

In matrimony, to hesitate is sometimes to be saved.