Quotes from Samuel Butler

The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.

We want words to do more than they can. We try to do with them what comes to very much like trying to mend a watch with a pickaxe or to paint a miniature with a mop; we expect them to help us to grip and dissect that which in ultimate essence is as ungrippable as shadow. Nevertheless there they are; we have got to live with them, and the wise course is to treat them as we do our neighbours, and make the best and not the worst of them.

It is tact that is golden, not silence.

It stands to reason that he who would cure a moral ailment must be practically acquainted with it in all its bearings.

For society indeed of all sorts, except of course that of a few intimate friends, he had an unconquerable aversion. "I always did hate those people," he said, "and they always have hated and always will hate me. I am an Ihsmael by instinct as much as by accident of circumstances, but if I keep out of society I shall be less vulnerable than Ishmaels generally are. The moment a man goes into society, he becomes vulnerable all round.

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

La vida es el arte de sacar conclusiones suficientes a partir de datos insuficientes.

Every one should keep a mental wastepaper basket and the older he grows the more things he will consign to it - torn up to irrecoverable tatters.

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.

There are orphanages," he exclaimed to himself, "for children who have lost their parents--oh! why, why, why, are there no harbours of refuge for grown men who have not yet lost them?

I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong.

A credulous mind . . . finds most delight in believing strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass with him; but never regards those that are plain and feasible, for every man can believe such.

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

All animals except man know that the ultimate of life is to enjoy it.

common sense, though she is by nature the gentlest creature living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt to develop unexpected powers of resistance, and to send doctrinaires flying, even when they have bound her down and think they have her at their mercy.

I do not greatly care whether I have been right or wrong on any point, but I care a good deal about knowing which of the two I have been.

No boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect — give them a bone and they will like you at once.

I firmly believe that the same thing would happen in nine families out of ten if the parents were merely to remember how they felt when they were young, and actually to behave towards their children as they would have had their own parents behave towards themselves. But this, which would appear to be so simple and obvious, seems also to be a thing which not one in a hundred thousand is able to put in practice.

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

It is hard enough to know whether one is happy or unhappy now, and still harder to compare the relative happiness or unhappiness of different times of one's life; the utmost that can be said is that we are fairly happy so long as we are not distinctly aware of being miserable.

Can anyone do much for anyone else unless by making a will in his favour and dying then and there? Should not each look after his own happiness, and will not the world be best carried on if everyone minds his own business and leaves other people to mind theirs?

There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now should provide small comfort. ...what will they not in the end become?

Conscience is thoroughly well bred and soon leaves off talking to those who do not wish to hear it.