Samuel Butler Quotes

All eating is a kind of proselytising — a kind of dogmatising — a maintaining that the eater's way of looking at things is better than the eatee's.

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

All things are like exposed photographic plates that have no visible image on them till they have been developed.

We do not know what death is. If we know so little about life which we have experienced, how shall be know about death which we have not — and in the nature of things never can?

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

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

If a man would get hold of the public era, he must pay, marry, or fight.

For property is robbery, but then, we are all robbers or would-be robbers together, and have found it essential to organise our thieving, as we have found it necessary to organise our lust and our revenge. Property, marriage, the law; as the bed to the river, so rule and convention to the instinct; and woe to him who tampers with the banks while the flood is flowing.

The most important service rendered by the press and the magazines is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust.

Animals and plants cannot understand our business, so we have denied that they can understand their own. What we call inorganic matter cannot understand the animals' and plants' business, we have therefore denied that it can understand anything whatever.

My notes always grow longer if I shorten them. I mean the process of compression makes them more pregnant and they breed new notes.

I doubt whether any angel would find me very entertaining. As for myself, if ever I do entertain one it will have to be unawares. When people entertain others without an introduction they generally turn out more like devils than angels.

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

No Erewhonian believes that the world is as black as it has been here painted, but it is one of their peculiarities that they very often do not believe or mean things which they profess to regard as indisputable.

Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.