Samuel Butler Quotes

A lawyer’s dream of heaven: every man reclaimed his own property at the resurrection, and each tried to recover it from all his forefathers.

Jesus! with all thy faults I love thee still.

To live is like to love—all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance.

Handel is so great and so simple that no one but a professional musician is unable to understand him.

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

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

As soon as any art is pursued with a view to money, then farewell, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, all hope of genuine good work.

There’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle.

‘Getting into the key of C sharp,’ he said, ‘is like an unprotected female travelling on the Metropolitan Railway, and finding herself at Shepherd’s Bush, without quite knowing where she wants to go to. How is she ever to get safe back to Clapham Junction?’

A man’s friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage.

Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

The advantage of doing one’s praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another and so make only two people miserable instead of four.

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

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.

The wish to spread those opinions that we hold conducive to our own welfare is so deeply rooted in the English character that few of us can escape its influence.