Quotes from Samuel Butler

Our latest moment is always our supreme moment. Five minutes delay in dinner now is more important than a great sorrow ten years gone.

It is the function of vice to keep virtue within reasonable grounds.

A virtue to be serviceable must, like gold, be alloyed with some commoner but more durable metal.

When I was young I used to think the only certain thing about life was that I should one day die. Now I think the only certain thing about life is that there is no such thing as death.

To give pain is the tyranny; to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

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

God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.

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

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 dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

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

Men are seldom more commonplace than on supreme occasions.

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

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

Always eat grapes downwards — that is, always eat the best grape 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...

Academic and aristocratic people live in such an uncommon atmosphere that common sense can rarely reach them.

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

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

Let man be true and every god a liar.

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

Is life worth living? This is a question for an embryo not for a man.

One of the first businesses of a sensible man is to know when he is beaten, and to leave off fighting at once.

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.

A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand.