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

Genius might be described as a supreme capacity for getting its possessors into trouble of all kinds.

—Samuel Butler

Son, always tell the truth. Then you'll never have to remember what you said the last time.

—Samuel Butler

When you have told anyone you have left him a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.

—Samuel Butler

Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies.

—Samuel Butler

Man is the Only Animal that Blushes. Or needs to.

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler

The thief. Once committed beyond a certain point, he should not worry himself too much about not being a thief anymore. Thieving is God's message to him. Let him try and be a good thief.

—Samuel Butler

Never discourage anyone...who continually makes progress, no matter how slow.

—Samuel Butler

Let us be grateful to the mirror for revealing to us our appearance only.

—Samuel Butler

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler

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

—Samuel Butler

I consider being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill.

—Samuel Butler

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

—Samuel Butler