Quotes from Samuel Butler

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

The public do not know enough to be experts yet know enough to decide between them.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy, the only decent thing to do is die at once.

To die is but to leave off dying and do the thing once for all.

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

And, after all, the Athanasian Creed is light and comprehensible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

Men of Science. If they are worthy of the name they are indeed about God's path and about his bed and spying out all his ways.

Business should be like religion and science; it should know neither love nor hate.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

Life is one long process of getting tired.

Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule. Nevertheless one had better know the rules, for they sometimes guide in doubtful cases, though not often.

Justice is my being allowed to do whatever I like. Injustice is whatever prevents my doing so.

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.

It is not he who gains the exact point in dispute who scores most in controversy - but he who has shown the better temper.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.

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.

We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.

If I die prematurely at any rate I shall be saved from being bored to death by my own success.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage - but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.