Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

Samuel Butler Novelist

  • Gender: Male
  • Citizenship: United Kingdom
  • Born: Dec 4, 1835
  • Died: Jun 18, 1902

Samuel Butler was an iconoclastic Victorian-era English author who published a variety of works. Two of his most famous pieces are the Utopian satire Erewhon and a semi-autobiographical novel published posthumously, The Way of All Flesh. He is also known for examining Christian orthodoxy, substantive studies of evolutionary thought, studies of Italian art, and works of literary history and criticism. Butler made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey, which remain in use to this day.

All philosophies, if you ride them home, are nonsense, but some are greater nonsense than others.

We shall never get people whose time is money to take much interest in atoms.

Some men love truth so much that they seem to be in continual fear lest she should catch a cold on overexposure.

He has spent his life best who has enjoyed it most. God will take care that we do not enjoy it any more than is good for us.

Human life is as evanescent as the morning dew or a flash of lightning.

A drunkard would not give money to sober people. He said they would only eat it, and buy clothes and send their children to school with it.

Theist and atheist: the fight between them is as to whether God shall be called God or shall have some other name.

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

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

A skilful leech is better far, than half a hundred men of war.

Brigands demand your money or your life women require both.

Death is only a larger kind of going abroad.

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

Marriage is distinctly and repeatedly excluded from heaven. Is this because it is thought likely to mar the general felicity?

Work with some men is as besetting a sin as idleness.

For truth is precious and divine, too rich a pearl for carnal swine.

Life is like music it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.

To give pain is the tyranny to make happy, the true empire of beauty.

If life must not be taken too seriously, then so neither must death.

Friendship is like money, easier made than kept.

Most people have never learned that one of the main aims in life is to enjoy it.

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

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

God and the Devil are an effort after specialization and the division of labor.

If I die prematurely I shall be saved from being bored to death at my own success.

Let every man be true and every god a liar.

In law, nothing is certain but the expense.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little want of knowledge is also a dangerous thing.

You can do very little with faith, but you can do nothing without it.

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

The worst thing that can happen to a man is to lose his money, the next worst his health, the next worst his reputation.

Faith - you can do very little with it, but you can do nothing without it.

There is no such source of error as the pursuit of truth.

An apology for the devil: it must be remembered that we have heard one side of the case. God has written all the books.

The sinews of art and literature, like those of war, are money.

God was satisfied with his own work, and that is fatal.

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions.

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

The Bible may be the truth, but it is not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The Athanasian Creed is to me light and intelligible reading in comparison with much that now passes for science.

And so there is no God but has been in the loins of past gods.

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

From a worldly point of view, there is no mistake so great as that of being always right.

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

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

Lying has a kind of respect and reverence with it. We pay a person the compliment of acknowledging his superiority whenever we lie to him.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.

A physician's physiology has much the same relation to his power of healing as a cleric's divinity has to his power of influencing conduct.

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

God as now generally conceived of is only the last witch.

Vaccination is the medical sacrament corresponding to baptism. Whether it is or is not more efficacious I do not know.

What is faith but a kind of betting or speculation after all? It should be, I bet that my Redeemer liveth.

People in general are equally horrified at hearing the Christian religion doubted, and at seeing it practiced.

It is a wise tune that knows its own father, and I like my music to be the legitimate offspring of respectable parents.

Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

There is nothing which at once affects a man so much and so little as his own death.

The history of art is the history of revivals.

Fear is static that prevents me from hearing myself.

All truth is not to be told at all times.

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

They say the test of literary power is whether a man can write an inscription. I say, 'Can he name a kitten?'

Women can stand a beating except when it is with their own weapons.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.

The want of money is the root of all evil.

It has been said that the love of money is the root of all evil. The want of money is so quite as truly.

Think of and look at your work as though it were done by your enemy. I you look at it to admire it, you are lost.