Samuel Butler Quotes
Best 48 Quotes by Samuel Butler – Page 1 of 2
“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.”
“A friend who cannot at a pinch remember a thing or two that never happened is as bad as one who does not know how to forget.”
“A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg.”
“All animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it.”
“All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.”
“Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise man to be able to sell it.”
“Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.”
“Autumn is the mellower season, and what we lose in flowers we more than gain in fruits.”
“Books are like imprisoned souls till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.”
“Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both.”
“Don't learn to do, but learn in doing.”
“Every man's work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.”
“Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.”
“Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.”
“God cannot alter the past, though historians can.”
“I do not mind lying, but I hate inaccuracy.”
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“I often think that men don't understand what is noble and what is ignorant, though they always talk about it.”
“I have never written on any subject unless I believed that the authorities on it were hopelessly wrong.”
“It is death, and not what comes after death, that men are generally afraid of.”
“Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.”
“Life is like giving a concert on the violin while learning to play the instrument.”
“Life is like music, it must be composed by ear, feeling and instinct, not by rule.”
“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.”
“Life is one long process of getting tired.”
“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”
“Logic is like the sword—those who appeal to it shall perish by it.”
“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”
“Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.”
“Morality is the custom of one’s country and the current feeling of one’s peers. Cannibalism is moral in a cannibal country.”
“Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.”
“Parents are the last people on Earth who ought to have children.”
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“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded.
It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life.
They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
