Samuel Butler Quotes

The clergyman is expected to be a kind of human Sunday. Things must not be done in him which are venial in the week-day classes. He is paid for this business of leading a stricter life than other people. It is his raison d’être. If his parishioners feel that he does this, they approve of him, for they look upon him as their own contribution towards what they deem a holy life. This is why the clergyman is so often called a vicar — he being the person whose vicarious goodness is to stand for that of those entrusted to his charge. But his home is his castle as much as that of any other Englishman, and with him, as with others, unnatural tension in public is followed by exhaustion when tension is no longer necessary. His children are the most defenceless things he can reach, and it is on them in nine cases out of ten that he will relieve his mind. A

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.

Books are like imprisoned souls until someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.

A blind man knows he cannot see, and is glad to be led, though it be by a dog; but he that is blind in his understanding, which is the worst blindness of all, believes he sees as the best, and scorns a guide.

I am the enfant terrible of literature and science. If I cannot, and I know I cannot, get the literary and scientific big-wigs to give me a shilling, I can, and I know I can, heave bricks into the middle of them.

There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second.

"Mention but the word "divinity," and our sense of the divine is clouded."

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

The greatest 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.

Truth might be heroic, but it was not within the range of practical domestic politics.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

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.

I do not greatly care whether I have been right or wrong on any point, but I care a good deal about knowing which of the two I have been.

Words are like money; there is nothing so useless, unless when in actual use.