Quotes from Samuel Butler

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.

P]oetry resembles metaphysics: one does not mind one's own, but one does not like anyone else's.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Having, then, once introduced an element of inconsistency into his system, he was far too consistent not to be inconsistent consistently, and he lapsed ere long into an amiable indifferentism which to outward appearance differed but little from the indifferentism …

A definition is the enclosing a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.

Memory and forgetfulness are as life and death to one another. To live is to remember and to remember is to live. To die is to forget and to forget is to die.

My main wish is to get my books into other people's rooms, and to keep other people's books out of mine.

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

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

Youth is like spring, an over praised season more remarkable for biting winds than genial breezes. Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

If a man knows not life which he hath seen, how shall he know death, which he hath not seen?

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

There is no true gracefulness which is not epitomized goodness.

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

All men can do great things, if they know what great things are.

The true laws of God are the laws of our own well-being.

Opinion governs all mankind, like the blind's leading of the blind

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity, and pride and arrogance.

An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.

The world will, in the end, follow only those who have despised as well as served it.

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