Quotations from

Samuel Butler

About

Picture of Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (published posthumously in 1903 with substantial revisions and published in its original form in 1964 as Ernest Pontifex or The Way of All Flesh). Both novels have remained in print since their initial publication. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted.

from Wikipedia

Quotes from Samuel Butler

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.

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler

The great pleasure of a dog is that you may make a fool of yourself with him and not only will he not scold you, but he will make a fool of himself too.

—Samuel Butler

People care more about being thought to have taste than about being thought either good, clever or amiable.

—Samuel Butler

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

—Samuel Butler

The man who lets himself be bored is even more contemptible than the bore.

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler

To live is like to love — all reason is against it, and all healthy instinct for it.

—Samuel Butler

Self-preservation is the first law of nature.

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler

The history of art is the history of revivals.

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler

Oaths are but words, and words are but wind.

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler