Samuel Butler Quotes

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

All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

As there can be no translation from one language into another which shall not scant the meaning somewhat, or enlarge upon it, so there is no language which can render thought without a jarring and a harshness somewhere.

To himself everyone is immortal; he may know that he is going to die, but he can never know he is dead.

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

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

The world is naturally averse to all truth it sees or hears
but swallows nonsense and a lie with greediness and gluttony.

A credulous mind . . . finds most delight in believing
strange things, and the stranger they are the easier they pass
with him; but never regards those that are plain and
feasible, for every man can believe such.

Friendship is like Money; easier made than kept.

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.

Prayers are to men as dolls are to children.

the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

There is no security against the ultimate development of mechanical consciousness, in the fact of machines possessing little consciousness now should provide small comfort. ...what will they not in the end become?

La vida es el arte de sacar conclusiones suficientes a partir de datos insuficientes.