Top 15 Samuel Butler Quotes

A man's friendships are, like his will, invalidated by marriage—but they are also no less invalidated by the marriage of his friends.

An empty house is like a stray dog or a body from which life has departed.

As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names — not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman. Then he saw also that it matters little what profession, whether of religion or irreligion, a man may make, provided only he follows it out with charitable inconsistency, and without insisting on it to the bitter end. It is in the uncompromisingness with which dogma is held and not in the dogma or want of dogma that the danger lies.

A man can stand being told that he must submit to a severe surgical operation, or that he has some disease which will shortly kill him, or that he will be a cripple or blind for the rest of his life; dreadful as such tidings must be, we do not find that they unnerve the greatest number of mankind; most men, indeed, go coolly enough even to be hanged, but the strongest quail before financial ruin, and the better men they are, the more complete, as a general rule, is their prostration.

The best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.

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

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.

To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not.

Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime.

One great reason why clergymen's households are generally unhappy is because the clergyman is so much at home or close about the house.

How is it, I wonder, that all religious officials, from God the Father to the parish beadle, should be so arbitrary and exacting.

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

Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.

Taking numbers into account, I should think more mental suffering had been undergone in the streets leading from St George's, Hanover Square, than in the condemned cells of Newgate.

A pair of lovers are like sunset and sunrise: there are such things every day but we very seldom see them.