Quotes from Samuel Butler

Theist and atheist: The fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.

Our minds want clothes as much as our bodies.

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.

For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and revenge. 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.

If it was not such an awful thing to say of anyone, I should say that she meant well.

An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or it may be found a little drafty.

Homer tells us about some one who made it his business ±¹µ½ ±Á¹Ã??¹½ º±¹ ÅÀµ¹Á¿Ç¿½ µ¼¼µ½±¹ ±»»É½ — always to excel and to stand higher than other people. What an uncompanionable disagreeable person he must have been! Homer's heroes generally came to a bad end, and I

Why should the generations overlap one another at all?  Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the sphex wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow, but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before it began to live consciously on its own account? About

The room in fact was as depressing from its slatternliness as from its atmosphere of erudition. 

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage — but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends. The rift in friendship which invariably makes its appearance on the marriage of either of the parties to it was fast widening, as it no less invariably does, into the great gulf which is fixed between the married and the unmarried, and I was beginning to leave my protege to a fate with which I had neither right nor power to meddle.

If I had shown half as many dangerous tendencies when I was a boy, my father would have apprenticed me to a greengrocer, of that I'm very sure

Der Unterschied zwischen Gott und einem Historiker: Gott kann die Vergangenheit nicht ändern.

To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not.

Embryo minds, like embryo bodies, pass through a number of strange metamorphoses before they adopt their final shape.

If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.

A man at five and thirty should no more regret not having had a happier childhood than he should regret not having been born a prince of the blood.

An idea must not be condemned for being a little shy and incoherent; all new ideas are shy when introduced first among our old ones. We should have patience and see whether the incoherency is likely to wear off or to wear on, in which latter case the sooner we get rid of them the better.

the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

The evil that men do lives after them. Yes, and a good deal of the evil that they never did as well.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

Moral influence means persuading another that one can make that other more uncomfortable than that other can make oneself.

Exploring is delightful to look forward to and back upon, but it is not comfortable at the time, unless it be of such an easy nature as not to deserve the name.  

it is our less conscious thoughts and our less conscious actions which mainly mould our lives and the lives of those who spring from us.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard only one side of the case. God has written all the books.