Samuel Butler Quotes

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

"Brigands demand your money or your life; women require both"

"There are two great rules of life; the one general and the other particular. The first is that everyone can, in the end, get what he wants, if he only tries. That is the general rule. The particular rule is that every individual is, more or less, an exception to the rule."

"For every why he had a wherefore."

"Then spare the rod and spoil the child."

"Eating is touch carried to the bitter end."

"Young as he was, his instinct told him that the best liar is he who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way - who husbands it too carefully to waste it where it can be dispensed with"

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

"In law, nothing is certain but the expense."

"The public buys its opinions as it buys its meat, or takes in its milk, on the principle that it is cheaper to do this than to keep a cow. So it is, but the milk is more likely to be watered."

"Morality is the custom of one's country and the current feeling of one's peers"

"Science, after all, is only an expression for our ignorance of our own ignorance."

"A man should be just cultured enough to be able to look with suspicion upon culture at first, not second hand."

"Virtue knows that it is impossible to get on without compromise, and tunes herself, as it were, a trifle sharp to allow for an inevitable fall in playing."

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

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

"For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure /tangible material prosperity in this world /is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism."

"Let who will boast their courage in the field, I find but little safety from my shield. Nature's, not honour's, law we must obey: This made me cast my useless shield away, And by a prudent flight and cunning save a life, which valour could not, from"

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

"Genius is a nuisance, and it is the duty of schools and colleges to abate it by setting genius-traps in its way."