Samuel Butler Quotes

We are not won by arguments that we can analyze but by tone and temper, by the manner which is the man himself.

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

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.

Nao só nada é bom ou mau, mas é o pensamento que o faz assim, como também nada é absolutamente, excepto na medida em que o pensamento o faz assim.

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.

the principal business of life is to enjoy it.

I firmly believe that the same thing would happen in nine families out of ten if the parents were merely to remember how they felt when they were young, and actually to behave towards their children as they would have had their own parents behave towards themselves. But this, which would appear to be so simple and obvious, seems also to be a thing which not one in a hundred thousand is able to put in practice.

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

The flesh of animals who feed excursively is allowed to have a higher flavour than that of those who are cooped up. May there not be the same difference between men who read as their taste prompts and men who are confined in cells and colleges to stated tasks?

It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.

common sense, though she is by nature the gentlest creature living, when she feels the knife at her throat, is apt to develop unexpected powers of resistance, and to send doctrinaires flying, even when they have bound her down and think they have her at their mercy.

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.

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

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

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?