Samuel Butler Quotes

No boy can resist being fed well by a good-natured and still handsome woman. Boys are very like nice dogs in this respect — give them a bone and they will like you at once.

Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.

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.

Words are clothes that thoughts wear

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.

Life is like playing the violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

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 …

Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

"For society indeed of all sorts, except of course that of a few intimate friends, he had an unconquerable aversion. "I always did hate those people," he said, "and they always have hated and always will hate me. I am an Ihsmael by instinct as much as by accident of circumstances, but if I keep out of society I shall be less vulnerable than Ishmaels generally are. The moment a man goes into society, he becomes vulnerable all round.

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.

To do great work one must be very idle as well as very industrious.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

People are always in good company when they are doing what they really enjoy.